


Please Just Stay Dead

by cutupangels



Category: My Chemical Romance, Pet Sematary - Stephen King
Genre: Big ass trucks, F/M, I wanna fucking die this is terrible, Nicole is everyone's mom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 09:56:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 27,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17020482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cutupangels/pseuds/cutupangels
Summary: "wildfires have been eating you inside my head/try to smoke you out or burn you away with it/this time please just stay dead"-nicole dollanganger





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "When the leaves came to fall, I tried to catch them all"

Frank Iero, who lost his mother at three and who had never known a grandmother, never expected to find a mother figure as he entered middle age, but that's exactly what happened. Although he called this woman a friend, as a grown man must do when he finds the woman who should have been his mother relatively later in his life.

He met this woman on the evening he and his wife, Jamia, and their three kids moved into the big white frame house in Gradyville. Sweet Pea moved in there with them. Sweet Pea was the family dog.

The search committee at the university had moved slowly, the hunt for a house within commuting distance of the university had been hair raising and by the time they neared the place where he believed the house to be, they were all tired and tense and on edge. Cherry and Lily were fighting over rooms and no matter how many times Jamia scolded them, they wouldn't quit arguing.

In the back of the car, Sweet Pea continued to pace rentlessly as she had done for the last three days it had taken them to drive here from Savannah. Her whining from the dog kennel had been bad, but her restless pacing after they finally gave up and set her free in the car had been almost as unnerving.

Frank himself felt stressed. A wild but not unattractive idea suddenly came to him: he would suggest that they go back to Newark for something to eat while they waited for the moving van, and when his four hostages to fortune got out, he would floor the accelerator and drive away without so much as a look back, floor to the mat, the Honda's huge four wheel carburetor gobbling expensive gasoline.

He would drive South, all the way to Orlando where he would get a job at Disney World as a medic, under a new name. But before he hit the turnpike, he would stop by the side of the road and put the fucking dog out too.

Then they rounded a final curve and there was the house that he had only seen up until now. He had flown out looked and looked at each of the seven possibles they had picked from photos once the university was solidly his, and this was the one he had chosen: a big old New England colonial.

Beyond the house was a large field for the kids to play in and beyond the field was woods that went on forever. The property abided state laws, the realtor had explained, and there will be no developments in the woods in the foreseeable future. The remains of the Micmac Indian Tribe had laid claim to nearly eight thousand acres in Gradyville and in the town's east of Gradyville, and the complicated litigation involving the federal government as well as that of the state, might stretch into the next year.

Jamia sat up abruptly. "Is that-"

"That's it. What do you think?"

"I think it's beautiful." Jamia said, and that was a huge weight off his chest- and off his mind. She wasn't kidding. It was in the way she was looking at it as they turned in the asphalted driveway that curved around to the shed in the back, her eyes sweeping the back windows, he mind already ticking away at such matters as curtains, rugs, and God knows what else.

"Daddy?" Lily said from the back seat. 

"What, honey?"

Her eyes also surveyed the house, the lawn, the roof of another house off to the left in the distance, and the big field stretching up to the woods. "Is this home?"

"It's going to be." He said.

"Yay!" She shouted, almost bursting his ear drum.

He parked in front of the shed and turned off the engine. In the silence, which seemed very big after the road trip, a bird sang sweetly in the late afternoon.

"Home." Jamia said softly, still looking at the house.

"Home." Miles replied.

Jamia and Frank stared at each other. In the rearview mirror, the twins eyes widened.

"Did you?"

"Did he?"

"Was that?"

They all spoke together, then all laughed together. Miles took no notice; he only continued to suck his thumb. He had been saying Ma for almost a month now and had taken a stab or two at something that might have been Da or only wishful thinking on Frank's part.

But this, either by accident or imitation, had been a real word. Home.

***********

In Frank's memory that one moment always held a magical quality, partly perhaps because it really was magical, but mostly because the rest of the evening was so wild. In the next three hours, neither peace nor magic made an appearance.

Frank had stored the house keys away neatly in a small Manila envelope which he had labeled 'Gradyville House-keys received June 29.' He had put the keys away in the Honda's glove compartment. He was absolutely sure of that. Now they weren't there.

While he hunted for them, growing increasingly irritated, Jamia hoisted Miles onto her hip and followed the girls over to the tree in the field. He was checking under the seats for the third time when his daughter screamed and then began to cry.

"Daddy!" Lily called. "Cherry cut herself."

Cherry had fallen from the tire swing and hit a rock with her knee. The cut was shallow, but she was screaming like someone who had just lost a leg. 

"All right, Cherry." He said. "That's enough. Those people over there will think someone is being murdered."

"But it hurts!"

Frank began to struggle with his temper and went silently back to the car. The keys were gone, but the first aid kit was still in the glove compartment. He got it and came back. When Cherry saw it, she began to scream louder than ever.

"No! Not the stingy stuff! I don't want the stingy stuff, daddy!"

"Cherry, it's just Neosporin and it doesn't sting."

"Be a big girl," Jamia said. "It's just-"

"No, no, no, no, no!"

"You want to stop that or your ass will sting."

"She's tired, Frank." Jamia said quietly.

"Yeah, I know the feeling. Hold her leg out."

Jamia put Miles down and held Cherry's leg, which Frank painted with Neosporin in spit of her increasingly hysterical wails.

"Someone just came out on the porch of that house across the street." Jamia said. She picked Miles up. He had started to crawl away through the grass.

"Wonderful." Frank muttered.

"Frank, she's -"

"Tired, I know." He capped the Neosporin and looked grimly at his daughter. "There. And it really didn't hurt a bit. Fess up, Cherry."

"It does! It does! It hurts!"

"Did you find the keys?" Jamia asked.

"Not yet," Frank said, snapping the first aid kit closed and getting up. "I'll -"

Miles began to scream. He was not fussing or crying but really screaming, writhing in Jamia's arms.

"What's wrong with him?" Jamia cried, thrusting him almost blindly at Frank. It was one of the advantages of having married a doctor. You could shove the kid at your husband whenever the baby seem to be dying. "Frank! What's -"

The baby was grabbing frantically at his neck, screaming wildly. Frank flipped him over and saw an angry white knob rising on the side of Miles's neck. And there was also something on the side of his shirt, something fuzzy, squriming weakly.

Lily, who had become quiet, began to scream. "Bee!" She jumped back, tripped over the same protruding rock Cherry got hurt on, sat down, and began to cry in mingled pain, surprise, and fear.

'I'm going crazy.' Frank thought sarcastically. 

"Do something, Frank! Can't you do something?"

"Got to get the stinger out." A voice behind them drawled. "That's the ticket. Get the stinger out and put some baking soda on it. Then the bump will go down." But the voice was so high pitched that for a moment Frank's tired, confused mind refused to listen.

He turned and saw an young woman of perhaps 40 standing there on the grass. She wore a pink Sunday dress with black combat boots. She had tangled dirty blonde hair that oddly suited her pale skin. 

As Frank looked at her, the woman pinched the cigarette out between her thumb and forefinger and pocketed it neatly. She held out her hands and smiled crookedly. "Name's Nicole. And I'm not here to tell you how to do your job, doc." She laughed.

And that's how Frank met Nicole Dollanganger, the woman who should have been his mother.


	2. Nothing Gold Can Stay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "But we have a love and it shines like gold"

She had watched them arrive from across the street and had come across to see if she if she could help when it seemed they were "in a bit of a tight", as she put it.

While Frank held the baby on his shoulder, Nicole stepped near, looked at the swelling on Miles's neck and reached out with a bony hand. Jamia opened her mouth to protest but before she could say a word, Nicole's fingers had made a single decisive movement, as apt and deft as the fingers of a pianist perhaps. And the stinger laid in her palm.

"That's a big one." she remarked. "No prize winner, but it'd do for a runner up ribbon, I guess." 

Frank burst out laughing.

Nicole regarded him with that crooked smile and said "What a bitch, isn't it?"

"What did she say, Mommy?" Lily asked and then Jamia burst out laughing too. Of course it was really rude, but somehow it was okay. 

Nicole pulled out a pack of Marlboros, put one in between her teeth, and lit with a white lighter. "I'm pleased to meet you, Mr -"

"Frank Iero. This is my wife Jamia, my daughters Cherry and Lily, and the kid with the bee sting is Miles."

"Nice to meet y'all. Why don't you take your little boy and daughters over to the house for a minute, Mrs. Iero. We can put baking soda on a rag and cool that off a little. My husband would like to say hello too. He don't get out too much. He's been a bit sad lately."

Jamia glanced at Frank, who nodded.

"That would be very kind of you, Mrs. Dollanganger."

"Oh, I just answer to Nicole." she said.

There was a sudden loud honk, a motor winding down, and then the big U-Haul truck was lumbering into the driveway.

"Oh Jesus, I don't know where the keys are." Frank said.

"That's okay." said Nicole. "I got a set. Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong gave me a set about fourteen, fifteen years ago. They lived here for a while. Billie was my husband's best friend. He died two years ago. Adrienne went back to Oakland. I'll bring 'em back over. They belong to you now, I guess."

"You're very kind, Miss Dollanganger." Jamia said.

"Not at all." Nicole replied back. "Looking forward to having kids running around again. Mine are all grown. You just want to watch 'em around the road. Lots of big trucks on that road."

Now there was the sound of slamming doors as the moving men hopped out of the truck and came toward them. 

Cherry had wandered away a little and came back asking "Daddy, what's this?"

Frank glanced back.

At the edge of the field, where the lawn stopped and high summer grass took over, a path about four feet wide had been cut, smooth and close. It wound up the hill, curved through a low stand of bushes. 

"Looks like a path of some kind." Frank said.

"I'll tell you about it sometime. You want to come over and we fix your baby brother up?"

"Sure." Cherry said. "Does baking soda sting?"

**********

The next two weeks were busy ones for the family. Little by little Frank's new job began to shake down for him ( Who knew that college students these days were abusing drugs so much?) And while Frank began getting a handle on his job as head of University Medical Services, Jamia began to get a handle on the house. 

Miles was busy taking the bumps and spills that went with getting used to his new environment, and for a while his night time schedule was badly out of whack, but by the middle of their second week in Gradyville, he had begun to sleep through again. Cherry and Lily always seemed excited and on a hair trigger. Cherry would always go into prolonged giggles while Lily would throw temper tantrums at the drop of a hat.

His evening smoke with Nicole Dollanganger became something of a habit. Around the time Miles began sleeping through again, Frank would began bringing his own packs of Marlboros Reds every second night. 

He met Dan, a grungy long hair man who painted landscape portraits in his free time. Despite being monosyllabic and constantly having a glazed look in his eyes, the glazed look went away whenever he saw Nicole. He wasn't ashamed about talking about his serious bouts with depression and multiple hospitalizations because that was part of his life and Dan couldn't change it.

Jamia liked the couple and sealed the friendship with them by gossiping, trading recipes, and having small talk over a margarita or two. While she didn't felt a strong connection with them, she still enjoy the meaningless conversation with them.

The first day of kindergarten arrived. Frank, who felt pretty well in control of the infirmary and the medical support clinics, took the day off. He stood on the lawn besides Jamia with Miles in his arms, as the bus made the turn from Griffin Drive and lumbered to a stop in front of their house. The doors at the front opened, the yelling and chattering of children drifted out into the September air.

Lily cast a vulnerable glance back over her shoulder as if to ask them if there was time to escape and everything which would follow the day was simply inevitable. She turned away from them and mounted the steps of the bus. The doors folded shut with a gasp. The bus pulled away. Jamia burst into tears.

"Don't, for fuck's sakes." Frank said. He wasn't crying. Only damn near. "It's only half a day."

"Half a day is bad enough." Jamia answered in a scolding voice and began to cry harder. Frank held her and Miles slipped and arm comfortably around each parent's neck. When Jamia cried, Miles usually cried too. But not this time. 'He has us to himself' Frank thought. 'And he damn well knows it.'

*****

They waited with some trepidation for Cherry and Lily to return, drinking too much coffee, speculating on how it was going for the girls. Frank went out into the back room that was going to be his study and messed about, moving papers from one place to another but not doing much else. Jamia began lunch early.

When the phone rang at ten, Jamia raced for it and answered with a breathless "Hello?" before it could ring a second time. Frank stood in the doorway between his office and the kitchen, sure it would be a teacher telling them that she had decided the girls couldn't survive a day; the stomach of public education had found them indigestible and was spitting them back. But it was only Dan, calling to tell them that Nicole had made some lemonade and they were welcome to have some.

"It isn't worth a shit anyway." Dan said.

"I spent twenty minutes making this. So shut the hell up about it." Nicole said. She came out on the porch with the lemonade in Mason jars. 

"Sorry, baby."

"He isn't sorry a bit." Nicole said to Frank and sat down on a patio chair.

"Saw the girls get on the bus." Dan said, taking a drink.

"They'll be fine." Nicole said. "They're almost always are."

'Almost.' Frank thought morbidly.

*****

But the girls were fine. They came home around noon smiling and laughing. Cherry had a ribbon missing from her hair and a new scrape on her knee. Lily had a picture of two people or perhaps two balloon creatures in her hand, shouting, "We sang today. Mommy! Daddy! We sang today! Just like in my old school!"

Jamia glanced over at Frank, who was sitting in the window seat with Miles in his lap. The baby was almost asleep. There was something sad in Jamia's glance and although she looked away quickly, Frank felt a moment of panic. 

Cherry and Lily ran over to him, trying to show him the picture, Cherry's new scrape, and tell him about Mr. Trohman all at the same time. Sweet Pea was twining in and out around them, barking loudly, and no one was, miraculously, not tripping over her.

"Shh." Frank said. Miles had gone to sleep, unaware of all the excitement. "Just let me put the baby to bed and then I'll listen to everything."

He took Miles upstairs, walking through hot September sunshine and as he reached the landing, a premonition of horror and darkness struck him that he stopped and looked around in surprise, wondering what could possibly have come over him. He held Miles tighter, almost clutching him and Miles stirred uncomfortably. 

He wandered, confused and frightened. His heart was racing; his head felt cool and too small to cover his skull; he could feel the surge of adrenaline behind his eyes. Human eyes really did bug out whenever was extreme, he knew; they did not just widen but actually bugled as blood pressure climbed and the hydrostatic pressure of the cranial fluids increased. 'What the fuck is it? Ghosts? God, it really feels as if something just brushed by me in this hallway.'

Downstairs the screen door whacked against it's frame.

Frank jumped, almost screamed, and then laughed. It was one of those psychological cold pockets people some times passed through. A momentary figure. They happened, that was all. What had Scrooge said to Jacob Marley? 'You may be no more than an underdone bit of potato. There's more gravy than grave to you.' And that was more correct than Charles Dickens had probably know. There were no ghosts, at least not in his experience. He had pronounced dozens of people dead in his career and had never felt the passage of a soul.

He took Miles into his room and laid him in his bed. As he pulled the blanket up over his son, a shudder twisted up his back.

'Jesus Fucking Christ, what gave you the chills? Let it go! Get rid of it!'

He tucked in his son and went down to listen about the first day of school.


	3. But I Need Somebody

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "somebody crazy enough to save me"

That Saturday, after the girls had completed their first week of school and just before the college kids came back to campus, Nicole came across the road and walked over to where the family sat on their lawn. 

"Nicole." Frank said getting up. "Let me get you a chair."

"No need." Nicole was wearing a black skirt, a faded white crochet top, and her Doc Martins. "Does Cherry and Lily still want to see where the path goes?"

"Yes!" Cherry said, getting up immediately. 

"Someone at school told me it was the pet cemetery and I told mommy, but she said to wait for you because you knew where it was." Lily said.

"I do, too" Nicole said. "If it's okay with your parents, we'll take a stroll up there. You'll want a pair of boots though. The grounds are a bit squishy up there."

The girls raced each other into the house.

Nicole looked after them with amused affection. "Maybe you'd like to come too, Frank."

"I would." Frank said. He looked at Jamia. "You want to come, honey?"

"What about Miles?"

"I'll put him in the sling."

Jamia laughed. "Okay... But it's your back."

****

They walked on. Frank began to get a dull cramp of pain in his back from the baby carrier. Every now and then Miles would grab a handful of his hair and tug enthusiastically or administer a cheerful kick to Frank's kidneys. Late mosquitos cruised around his face and neck, making their eye watering hum.

The path curved down, bending in and out between very old firs and then cut widely through a brambly, tangled patch of undergrowth. The pathwas muddy here and Frank's boots squelched in mud and some standing water. At one point they stopped over a marshy spot using a pair of good sized rocks as stepping Stones. That was the worst of it. They started to climb again and the trees reasserted themselves. Miles seemed to have magically put on ten pounds and the day had warmed up ten degrees. Sweat poured down his face.

"How you doing, honey?" Jamia asked. "Want me to carry him for a while?"

"No, I'm fine." He said and it was true, although his heart was running along at a good speed in his chest. He was more used to prescribing physcial exercise than he was to doing it.

"Frank, does she really know where she's going?" Jamia asked in a low, sightly worried tone. 

"Sure." Frank said.

Nicole called back cheerily over her shoulder. "Not much further now. You okay back there?"

"I'm fine." Frank called back a little aggressively. Pride probably would have led him to say the same thing even if he had felt the onset of a coronary. He grinned, hitched the straps of the sling up a bit and went on.

They walked up the second hill and then the path sloped through a head high Swatch of bushes and tangled underbrush. It narrowed and then, just ahead, Frank saw his daughters and Nicole go under an arch made of old weather stained boards. Written in faded black paint were the words Pet Sematary.

He and Jamia exchanged an amused glance and stepped under the arch, instinctively reaching out and grasping each other's hands as they did so, as if they come here to be married. 

For the second time that morning Frank was surprised into wonder.

There was no carpet of needles here. Here was an almost perfect circle of mowed grass, perhaps as large as fourty feet in diameter. It was bounded by thickly interlaced underbrush on three sides and an old blowdown on the fourth, a jackstraw jumble of fallen trees that looked both sinister and dangerous. 'Someone tying to pick his way through that or climb over it would probably die from lack of experience' Frank thought. 

The clearing was crowded with graves, obviously made by children from whatever materials they could beg or borrorw. And yet, seen against the perimeter of low bushes and snagged trees that fought for living space and sunlight here, the very fact of their clumsy manufacture, and the fact that humans were responsible for what was here seemed to emphasize what symmetry they had. The forested backdrop lent the place a crazy sort of profundity, a charm that was not Christian but pagan.

"It's lovely." Jamia said, not sounding as if she meant it.

"Wow!" Lily yelled.

Frank unshouldered Miles and pulled him out of the baby carrier so he could crawl. He sighed with relief.

Cherry ran from one monument to the next, exclaming over each. Lily followed her. Nicole sat down cross legged, her back against a rock and smoked.

Frank noticed that the place did not just seem to have a sense of order, a pattern, the memorials had been arranged in a rough concentric circles.

'Callie The Cat', one crate board marker proclaimed. The hand was childish but careful. 'She Was Obedient.' and below this: 2013-2017

"Callie was the Stump's cat." Nicole said. She had dug a bald place in the earth with the heel of her boot and was carefully tapping all her ashes into it. "Got ran over by a four wheeler last year. Isn't that sad?"

"It sure is." Frank agreed.

Some of the graves were marked with flowers, some fresh, most old, a few almost totally decomposed. Over half of the painted and penciled inscriptions that he tried to rad had faded away to partial or total illegiblity. Others bore no discerning mark at all and he guessed that the writing on these might have been done with crayons or markers.

"Mommy!" Cherry yelled. "Here's a goldfishie! Come and see!"

"I'll pass." Jamia said and Frank glanced at her. She was standing by herself, outside the outermost circle, looking more uncomfortable than ever. She had never been easy around the appearances of death probably because of her brother. Jamia's brother had died very young and it had left a scar which Frank had learned early in their marriage not to talk about. His name was Evan and his death had been from spinal meningitis. His mortal illness had probably been long and painful and ugly and Jamia would have been at an impressionable age. If she wanted to forget it, he thought there could be no harm in that.

Frank gave her a wink and Jamia smiled gratefully at him.

Frank looked up. They were in a natural clearing. He supposed that explained how well the grass did, the sun could get through. Nevertheless it would have taken watering and careful tending. That meant cans of water lugged up here or maybe pumps even heavier than Miles in his sling carried on small backs. He thought again that it was an odd thing for children to have kept up for so long. His own memory of childhood enthusiasms, reinforced by his dealings with his kids, was that they tended to burn like newsprint- fast, hot, and quick to die.

Moving inward, the pet graves became older, fewer and fewer of the inscriptions could be read, but those that could yielded a rough timeline extending into the past. Here was Sandy, Kilt On The Highway Sept 15, 1998. In the same circle was a wide flat board planted deep in the earth. Frost and thaw had warped it and canted it to one side, but Frank could still make out In Memory Of Toby Our Pet Rabit March 1 2002.

A row further in was Rambo (Our! Good! Dog!the inscrption amplfied), who had died in 1995 and Molly who had squawked her last Polly wants a cracker in the summer of 1989. There was nothing readable in the next two rows, and then, still a long way in from the center, chiseled roughly on a piece of sandstone, was Jack The Best Dog Who Ever Lived 1958-1968. Although sandstone was relatively soft, Frank found it hard to conceive of the hours some child must have spent impressing those nine words on the stone. The commitment of love and grief seemed to him staggering, this was something parents did not even do for their own parents or for their children if they died young. 

"God, this does go back some." He said to Nicole, who had strolled over to join him.

Nicole nodded. "Come here. Want to show you something."

They walked to a row only three back from the center. Here the circular pattern perceived as an almost haphazard coincidence in the outer row,  was very evident. Nicole stopped before a small piece of slate that had fallen over again. 

"Used to be words here." Nicole said. "I chisled it myself, but it's worn away now. I buried my first dog here. Spot. He died of old age."

Bemused buy the thought that here was a graveyard that went farther back than many graveyards for people, Frank walked towards the center and examined several of the graves. None of them were readable and most had been almost reclaimed by the forest floor. The grass had almost entirely bovergrown one and when he set it back up, there was a small tearing, protesting sound from the ground. Blind beetles scurried over the section he had exposed. He felt a small chill and thought, Boot Hill for animals. I'm not sure I like it.

"How far do these go back?"

"Sorry, I don't know." Nicole said, putting her hands deep in her pockets. "Place was here when Spot died, of course. I had a whole lot of friends in those days. They helped me dig the hole for Spot. Digging here ain't that easy either. And I helped them sometimes." She pointed here and there around the site. "That there was Pete Wentz's dog, if I remember right and that's three of Ian Crawford's cats buried right there."

Frank said nothing, only stood looking at the pet graves with his hands in his pockets.

"Ground's Stony." Nicole repeated. "Couldn't plant nothing here but corpses anyway, I guess."

Across the way, Miles began to cry and Jamia brought him over, toting him on her hip. "He's hungry." She said. "I think we ought to go back." Please, okay? He eyes asked.

"Sure." He said. He shouldered the sling again and turned around so Jamia could pop Miles in. "Cherry! Lily! Where are you?"

"There they are." Jamia said and pointed toward the blowdown. They were climbing as if the blowdown was a bastard cousin to the monkey bars at school.

"Oh honey, you want to come down off there!" Nicole called over, alarmed. "You stick your foot in the wrong hole and those old trees shitty, you'll break your ankle."

They jumped down. "Ow!"

"You see what I mean?" Nicole said, ruffling her hair. "Old blowdown like this, even someone wise about the woods won't try to climb over it it he can go around. Trees that all fall down in a pile get mean. They'll bite you if they can."

"Really?" Lily asked.

"Really. They're piled up like straws, you see. And if you were to step on the right one, they might all come down in an avalanche."

Lily looked at Frank. "Is that true, dad?"

"I think so, honey."

"Yuck!" She looked back at the blowdown and yelled. "You tore my pants, you cruddy trees!"

All three of the adults laughed the blowdown did not. It mearly sat whitening in the sun as it had done for decades. To Frank it looked like the skeletal remains of some long dead monster, something slain by a good and gentle kinght perhaps. A dragon's bones, left here in a gain cairn.

It occurred to him even then that there was something too convenient about that blowdown and the way it stood between the pet cemetery and the depths of woods beyond, woods which Nicole Dollanganger later sometimes refer to absently as "the Indian woods." Its very randomness seemed too artful, too perfect for a work of nature. It-

Then Miles grabbed one of his ears and twisted it, yelling happily and Frank forgot all about the blowdown in the woods beyond the pet cemetery. It was time to go home.


	4. If You Still Care, Don't Ever Let Me Know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "but all of that was ripped apart when you refused to fight"

Cherry came to him the next day, looking troubled. She looked serious. 

"Hi, dad." She said.

"Hello, pumpkin. What's up?"

"Oh, nothing." She said, but her face said differently. Her face said that plenty was up and none of it was good. "Are we rich, daddy?"

"No," he said. "But we're not going to starve either."

"Declan at school says all doctors are rich."

"Well, you can tell Declan at school that lots of doctors get rich, but it takes twenty years and you don't get rich running a university infirmary. You get rich being a specialist. A gynecologist or an orthopedist or an neurologist. They get rich quicker. For utility infielders like me, it takes longer."

"Then why don't you be a specialist, daddy?"

"I just wouldn't like it." He said.

Lily carrying Sweet Pea in her arms came into the office, paused, inspected the situation with her bright green eyes. The dog jumped onto the windowsill and appeared to go to sleep.

Cherry glanced at the dog and frowned, which struck Frank as exceedingly odd. Usually Cherry looked at Sweet Pea with an expression of love so sappy it was almost painful. She began to walk around the office and said in a voice that was nearly casual, she said, "Boy, there was a lot of graves up in the Pet Sematary, weren't there?"

Ah, here's the problem, Frank thought.

"There were," he said. "Better than a hundred, I'd say."

"Daddy, why don't pets live as long as people?"

"Well, some animals do live about as long," he said, "and some live much longer. Elephants live a very long time, and there are some sea turtles so old that people really don't know how old they are...or maybe they do, and they just can't believe it."

Lily dismissed these simply enough. "Elephants and sea turtles aren't pets. Pets don't live very long at all. Declan at school said that every year a cat lives, it's like nine years of our lives."

"Seven," Frank corrected automatically. "I see what you're getting at, honey, and there's some truth to it. A cat who lives to be twelve is an old cat. See, there's this thing called metabolism and what metabolism seems to do is tell time. Oh, it does other stuff too—some people can eat a lot and stay thin because of their metabolism, like your mother. Other people—me, for instance— just can't eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, that's all. But what metabolism seems to do most of all is to serve living things as a body clock. Cats have a fairly rapid metabolism. The metabolism of human beings is much slower. We live to be about seventy-two, most of us. And believe me, seventy-two years is a very long time."

Because Cherry looked really worried, he hoped he sounded more sincere than he actually felt. He was thirty five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly as a draft under a door. "Sea turtles, now, have an even slower metabo–"

"What about dogs?" Lily asked and looked at Sweet Pea again. 

"Well, dogs live as long as cats." He said. "Mostly anyway."

This was a lie and he knew it. Dogs lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Sweet Pea, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Sweet Pea who slept peacefully on the couch every night, Sweet Pea who had been so cute as a puppy, chasing her tail every five seconds. 

And yet Frank had seen her stalk a squirrel with a broken leg, her eyes sparkling with curiosity and cold delight. She rarely killed what she stalked, but there had been one notable exception: a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Sweet Pea had really put the blocked to that baby. It had been so bloody and gore flecked that Jamia had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. 

A cat got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in cartoons, or another stray got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car. Dogs were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There was a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

But those were maybe not things to tell your five year old daughters, who was for the first time examining the facts of death. 

"I mean," he said. "Sweet Pea is only three now, and you're five. She might still be alive when you're fifteen, a sophomore in high school. And that's still a long time away."

"It doesn't seem long to me," Cherry said, and now her voice trembled. "Not long at all."

Frank gave up on explaining and gestured for her to come over. She sat on his lap and held his hand in a death grip. 

"Honey," he said. "If it was up to me, I'd let Sweet Pea live to be a hundred. But I don't make the rules."

"Who does?" Lily asked, and then, with infinite scorn: "God, I suppose."

Frank stifled the urge to laugh. It was too serious right now. 

"God or somebody." He said. "Clocks run down, that's all I know. There are no guarantees, baby."

"I don't want Sweet Pea to be like all those dead pets!" Cherry burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. "I don't want Sweet Pea to ever be dead! She's my dog! She's not God's dog! Let God have his own dog! Let God have all the dogs He wants and kill them all! Sweet Pea is mine!"

There were footsteps across the kitchen and Jamia looked in, startled. Cherry was now weeping against Frank's chest. The horror had been articulated, it was out,nits face had been drawn and could be regarded. Now, even if it could not be changed, it could at least be wept over.

"Cherry," he said, rocking her. "Sweet Pea isn't dead. She's right over there, sleeping."

"But she could be," she wept. "She could be, any time."

He held her and rocked her, believing rightly or wrongly, that Cherry wept for the very intractability of death, it's hard to argue over a little girl's tears, that she wept over it's cruel unpredictability and that she went because of the human being's wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Sweet Pea could die

(any time!)

and be buried and if that could happen to Sweet Pea, it could happen to her sister, her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea, the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those markers were truths which even a child's hands could feel.

It would be easy to lie at this point, the way he had lied about the life expectancy of dogs. But a lie would be remembered later and perhaps finally totted up on the report card all children hand in to themselves on their parents. His own mother had told him such a lie, an innocent one about women finding babies in cabbage patches when they really wanted than and as innocent as the lie had been, Frank had never forgiven his mother for telling it or himself for believing it.

"Honey," he said. "It happens. It's a part of life."

"It's a bad part!" She cried. "It's a really bad part!"

There was no answer for this. She wept. Eventually her tears would stop. It was a necessary first step on the way to making an uneasy peace with a truth that was never going to go away.

He held now both his daughters and listened to church bells on Sunday morning, floating across the September fields and it was some time after their tears had stopped before he realized that, like Sweet Pea, they had gone to sleep.

******

He put them up in their bunk beds and then came downstairs to the kitchen where Jamia was beating cake batter too hard. He mentioned his surprise that Cherry should just go off like that in the middle of the morning. It wasn't like her.  
"No." Jamia said, setting the bowl down on the counter with a decisive thump. "It isn't, but I think she was awake most of the night. I heard her tossing around and Sweet Pea cried to go out around three. She only does that when she's restless."

"Why would she..?"

"Oh, you know why!" Jamia said angrily. "That goddamned pet cemetery is why! It really upset them both. It was the first cemetery of any kind for them and it just...upset them. I don't think I'll write your friend any thank you notes for that little hike."

"Jamia.."

"And I don't want any of them going up there again."

"Jamia, what Nicole said about the path is true."

"It's not the path and you know it." Jamia said. She picked up the bowl again and began beating the cake batter even faster. "It's that damned place. It's unhealthy. Kids going up there and tending the graves, keeping the path...fucking morbid is what it is. Whatever disease the kids in this town have got, I don't want our kids catching it."

"Honey, it's just a pet cemetery." He said.

"The way she was crying in there just now," Jamia said, gesturing toward the door to his office with a batter covered spoon, "do you think it's just a pet cemetery to her? It's going to leave a scar, Frank. No. No one is going up there anymore. It's not the path, it's the place. Here she is already thinking Sweet Pea is going to die."

For a moment Frank had the crazy impression that he was still talking to Cherry. She had simply donned stilts, one of her mother's dresses, and a very realistic Jamia mask. Even the expression was the same—set and a bit sullen on top, but wounded beneath.

"Jamia," he said. "Sweet Pea is going to die."

She stared at him angrily. "That is hardly the point." She said, enunciating each word carefully, speaking as one might speak to a backward child. "Sweet Pea is not going to die today, or tomorrow."

"I tried telling her that."

"Or the day after that or probably for years."

"Honey, we can't be sure of th-"

"Of course we can!" She shouted. "We take good care of her, she's not going to die, no one is going to die around here and so why do you want to go and get a little girl all upset about something she can't understand until she's much older?"

"Jamia, listen." 

But Jamia had no intention of listening. She was blazing. "It's bad enough to try and cope with a death when it happens, without turning it into a...a fucking tourist attraction....a Forest Lawn for animals..." Tears were running down her cheeks.

"Jamia." He said and tried to put his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged them off in a quick, hard gesture.

"Never mind." She said. "You don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about."

He sighed. "I feel like I fell through a hidden trapdoor and into a giant black hole." He said, hoping for a smile. He got none. Only her eyes, locked on his, brown and blazing. She was furious he realized. Not just angry, but absolutely furious "Jamia." He said suddenly, not fully sure what he was going to say until it was out. "How did you sleep last night?"

"Oh yeah," she said scornfully, turning away but not before he had seen a wounded flicker in her eyes. "That's really smart. Really intelligent. You never change, Frank. When something isn't going right, blame Jamia, right? Jamia's just having one of her weird emotional breakdowns."

"That's not fair."

"It's not fair?" She took the bowl of cake batter over to the far counter by the stove and set it down with another bang. She began to grease a cake tin, her lips pressed tightly together.

He said patiently, "There's nothing wrong with a child finding out about death, Jamia. In fact, I'd call it a necessary thing. The girls' reaction seen perfectly natural to me."

"Oh, it sounded natural." Jamia said, whirling on him again . "It sounded very natural to hear them weeping there hearts out over their dog which is perfectly fine.."

"Stop it." He said. "You're not making any sense."

"I don't want to discuss it anymore."

"Yes, but we're going to," he said, angry himself now. "You had your at bats. How about giving me mine?"

"They're not going up there anymore. And as far as I'm concerned, the subject is closed."

"The girls knew where babies come from since last year." Frank said deliberately. "We got her the Myers book and talked to her about it, do you remember that? We both agreed that children ought to know here they come from."

"That has nothing to do with—"

"It does, though!" He said roughly. "When I was talking to them in my office, about Sweet Pea, I got thinking about my mother and how she spun me that stork story when I asked her where women get babies. I've never forgotten that lie. I don't think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them."

"Where babies come from has nothing to do with a fucking pet cemetery!" Jamia cried at him and what her eyes said to him was talk about the parallels all night and all day if you want to, Frank. Talk until you turn blue but I won't accept it.

Still, he tried.

"They know about babies. That place up in the woods just made her want to know something about the other end of things. It's perfectly natural. In fact, I think it's the most natural thing in the world."

"Will you stop saying that!" She screamed suddenly and Frank recoiled, startled. His elbow struck the open bag of flour on the counter. It tumbled off the edge and struck the floor, splitting open. Flour puffed up in a dry white cloud.

"Oh fuck." He said dismally.

In an upstairs room, Miles began to cry.

"That's nice." She said, also crying now. "You woke the baby up too. Thanks for a nice, quiet, stress less Sunday morning."

She went by him and Frank grabbed her arm. "Let me ask you something," he said, "because I know that anything can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that. Do you want to be the one to explain to them what happened if their dog got distemper or leukemia or if she gets run over in the road? Do you want to be the one, Jamia!?"

"Let me go!" She hissed. The anger in her voice, however, was overmatched by the hurt and bewildered terror in her eyes. "Let me go, I want to get Miles before he falls out of his cr-"

"Because maybe you ought to be the one." He said. "You can tell them we don't talk about it, nice people don't talk about it, they just bury it. Oops! But don't say buried, you'll trigger them."

"I hate you!" Jamia sobbed and tore away from him.

Then he was of course sorry and it was of course too late.

"Jamia!"

She pushed by him roughly, crying hardly. "Leave me alone. You've done enough." She paused in the kitchen doorway, tuning toward him, the tears coursing down her cheeks. "I don't want his discussed in front of the girls anymore. I mean it. There's nothing natural about death. Nothing. You as a doctor should know that."

She whirled and was gone, leaving Frank in the empty kitchen, which still vibrated with their voices. At last he went to the pantry to get the broom. As he swept, he reflected on the last thing she ad said and on the enormity of this difference of opinion, which had gone undiscovered for so long. Because, as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world. Taxes were not so sure, human conflicts were not, the conflicts of society is not, boom and bust were not. In the end there was only the clock and the graves, which became eroded and name less in the passage of time. 

"Evan." He said aloud. "God, that must have been bad for her."

The question was should he just let it ride or should he try to do something about it?


	5. Sprouting Sons And Ageless Daughters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Yes, we're all too smart to talk to god"

"Hope the girls don't take it too hard." Nicole said. 

He, Dan and Nicole now sat on the Dollanganger's porch in the cool of the evening, drinking iced tea instead of beer. Going home after the weekend traffic was fairly heavy—people recognized that every good late summer weekend now might be the last one, Frank supposed. 

Tomorrow he took up his full duties at the university infirmary. All day yesterday and today students had been arriving, filling apartments in the clinic and dorms on campus, making beds, renewing acquaintances, and no doubt groaning over another year of morning classes and cafeteria food. 

Jamia had been cold to him all day and when he went back across the road tonight, he knew that she would already be in bed, Miles sleeping with her more than likely, the two of them so far over to her side that the baby would be in danger of falling off. His half of the bed would have grown to three quarters, all of it looking like a big, sterile desert.

"I said I hoped-"

"Sorry." Frank said. "Dozing off. They were a little upset, yeah. How did you guess that?"

"I seen them come and go." Nicole took her husband's hand gently and grinned at him. "Haven't we, dear?"

"Tons of them." Dan said. "We love the children." He paused. "Not like that if that's what you're thinking." 

"Sometimes that pet cemetery is their first glance with death." Nicole said. "They see people die on TV, but they know that's pretend, like those old movies they used to show when the drive in was around. The place up on that hill seems a lot more real to most of them than all those movies and TV shows put together."

Frank nodded, thinking: Tell my wife that, why don't you?

"Some kids it don't affect them all, at least not so you can see it, although I'd guess most of them kinda...kinda take it home in their pockets to look over later, like all the other stuff they collect. Most of them are fine. But some...you remember the little Weekes boy, Dan?"

He nodded. Ice chattered softly in the glass he held. He brushed his long hair out of his eyes. "He had such terrible nightmares. Dreams about corpses coming out of the ground and what not. Than his dog died, I guess he ate something rotten. He and some of his friends had a funeral for the dog. It was just a mutt, but he loved it well. I remember his parents were a little against the burying, because of the nightmares and all, but it went off fine. Two of the bigger kids made a coffin, didn't they, Nicole?"

Nicole nodded and drained her iced tea. "Benjamin and Joel Madden." She said. "Them and that other kid Dallon was friends with- I can't remember his first name, but I'm sure he was one of the Hurley kids. You remember the Hurley's that used to live up on Middle Drive?"

"Yeah!" Matt said, as excited as if it had happened yesterday and perhaps in his mind, it seemed that way. "Andrew, I think."

"Anyways," Nicole agreed. "I remember they had a huge argument about who was going to be pallbearers. The dog wasn't very bit and there wasn't room but for two. The Madden boys said they ought to be the ones to do it since they made the coffin and also because they were brothers. Dallon said they didn't know the dog well enough to be the pallbearers. 'My dad says only close friends get to be pallbearers' was his argument.' "

"They were just about to fight over it when Dallon Googled funerals and there's a picture of Queen Victoria getting her final send-off and there's forty eight people on each side of her coffin, some sweating and straining to lift the old hag, some just were waiting around. And Dallon says, 'When it's a ceremonial funeral of state, you can have as many as you want! Google says so!'"

"That solved it?" Frank asked.

"Mhmm. They ended up with about twenty kids and damn if they didn't look just like the picture Dallon had found, except maybe for the ruffles and tall hats. Dallon took charge. He got them lined up and gave each of them a wildflower and off they went. You know, I always thought the country missed a bet when Dallon Weekes never got voted to the U.S. Congress." She laughed and shook her head. "Anyway, that was the end of Dallon's bad dreams about the Pet Sematary. He mourned his dog and finished his mourning and went on. Which is what we all do, I guess."

Frank thought again of Jamia's near hysteria.

"Your girls will get over it." Dan said and shifted in his chair. "You must be thinking that death is all we talk about around here. Nicole and I are interested in it, but I hope neither of us has gotten to the gory shit yet."

"No, of course not." Frank said.

"But it's not such a bad idea to be on nodding acquaintance with it. Back then...I don't know...no one wants to talk about it or think about it, it seems. They took it off the TV because they thought it might hurt the children some way...hurt their minds...and people want closed coffins so they don't have to look at the remains or say goodbye...it just seems like people want to forget it."

"And now they got five million versions of CSI. Funny how things change from one generation to the next, isn't it?"

"Yes." Frank said. "I suppose it is."

Frank stood up and stretched. "I have to go." He said. "Big day tomorrow."

"Yes, the merry go round starts for you tomorrow, doesn't it?" Nicole said, also standing.

"It's bad tonight, isn't it Dan?" Frank asked.

"Not so bad." He replied.

"Take some Excedrin when you go to bed."

"I will." Matt said. "I always do. And Frank, don't fret about the girls. They'll be too busy getting to know their new friends this fall to worry about that old place. Maybe someday they will go up and repaint some of the signs, or pull weeds, or plant flowers. Sometimes they do,when the notion takes them. And they'll feel better about it. They'll start to get that nodding acquaintance."

"Come on over tomorrow night and tell me how it went up at the college, if you get the chance." Nicole said. "I'll beat you at poker."

"Well, maybe I'll get you drunk first." Frank said. "Confuse you a bit."

"Doc," Nicole said with great sincerity, "the day I get confused at poker would be the day I'd let a quack like you treat me."

He left on their laughter and crossed the road to his own house in the late summer dark.

******

Jamia was sleeping with the baby, curled up on her side of the bed in a fetal, protective position. He suppose she would get over it—there had been other arguments and times of coldness in their marriage, but this one was surely the worst. He felt sad and angry and unhappy all at the same time, wanting to make it up but not sure how, not even sure that he first move should come from him. It was all so pointless—only a capful of wind somehow blown up to hurricane proportions by a trick of the mind. Other fights and arguments, yes sure but only a few as bitter as the one over Cherry's tears and questions. He supposed it didn't take a great many blows like that before the marriage sustained structural damage...and then one day, instead or reading it in a note from a friend or in the newspaper,it was you.

Everything done, the evening put neatly away, he went to bed, but couldn't sleep. There was something else, something that nagged at him. The last two days went around and around in his head as he listened to Jamia and Miles breathing nearly together. Rambo...Sandy The Best Dog That Ever Lived...Toby Our Pet Rabit...Cherry, furious. I don't want Sweet Pea to ever be dead!... She's not God's dog! Let God have His own dog! Jamia, equally furious. You as a doctor should know... Dan saying it just seems like people want to forget it...And Nicole, her voice terrible sure, terribly certain, a voice from another age: Sometimes it took dinner with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.

And that voice merged with the voice of his father, who had lied to him about sex at four but told him the truth about death at twelve, when his mother had been in a car accident. She had been crushed in her car by a kid who had found the keys in a a Public Works Department payloader and decided to take it for a ride and then found out he didn't know how to stop it. The kid suffered only minor cuts and contusions. 

'She can't be dead!" He had replied in shock to his father's bad statement. He had heard the words, but he couldn't seem to get the sense of them. 'What do you mean, she's dead? What are you talking about?' And then, as an afterthought: 'Who's gonna bury her?'For although his mother's brother was an undertaker, he couldn't imagine that his uncle would be the one to do it. In his confusion and mounting fear, he had seized upon this as the most important question. It was a genuine conundrum, like who cut the town barber's hair.

'I imagine that The Evans will do it.' his father replied. His eyes were red rimmed, most of all he looked tired. His father had looked almost ill with weariness. 'He's your uncle's best friend in the business. Oh Linda...I can't stand to think she suffered...pray with me, will you Frank? Pray with me for your mother. I need you to help me.'

So they prayed in that kitchen and it was the praying that finally brought it home to him. If his father was praying for his mother's soul, then it meant that her body was gone. Before his closed eyes rose a terrible image of his mother coming to his thirteenth birthday party with her decaying eyeballs hanging on her cheeks and blue mold growing in her brown hair. This image provoked not just sickening horror but an awful doomed love.

He cried out in the greatest mental agony of his life. "SHE CAN'T BE DEAD! MAMA, SHE CAN'T BE DEAD! I LOVE HER!"

And his father's reply, his voice flat and yet full of images: dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust. 'She is. I'm sorry, but she is. Your mother is gone.'

Frank shuddered, thinking 'Dead is dead. What else do you need?'

Suddenly Frank knew what it was he had forgotten to do, why he was still awake on this night before the first day of his new job, hashing over old griefs.

He got up, headed for the stairs, and suddenly detoured down the hall. Downstairs there was a bulletin board on the wall by the phone with various messages, memos, and bills tacked to it. Written across the top in Jamia's scribbly handwriting was Things To Put Off As Long As Possible. Frank got his phone, looked up a number, and jotted it on a blank memo sheet. Below the number he wrote: Travis Barker, D.V.M. call for appointment re Sweet Pea. If Barker doesn't neuter animals, he will refer.

He looked at the note, wondering if it was time, knowing that it was. Something concrete had to come out of all this bad feeling, and he had decided sometime between this morning and tonight that he didn't want Sweet Pea crossing the road anymore if she could help it.

His old feelings row up in him, the idea that neutering would lessen the dog, would turn her into a fat old mutt before her time, content to just sleep on the radiator until someone put something into her dish. He didn't want Sweet Pea like that. He liked Sweet Pea the way she was, lean and mean.

Outside in the dark, a big semi droned by on Route 15 and that decided him. He tacked the memo and went to bed.

****

The next morning at breakfast, Lily saw the new memo on the bulletin board and asked him what it meant. 

"It means she's going to have a very small operation." Frank said. "She'll probably have to stay over at the vet's for a night afterwards. And when she comes home, she'll stay in our yard and not want to roam around so much."

"Or cross the road?" Cherry asked.

"Or cross the road." Frank agreed.

"Yay!" Cherry said and that was the end of the subject.

Frank, who had been prepared for a bitter and perhaps hysterical argument about Sweet Pea being out of the house for even one night, was mildly stunned by the ease with which she had acquired. And he realized how worried she must have been. Perhaps Jamia had not been entirely wrong about the effect the Pet Sematary had on her.

Jamia herself, who was feeding Miles, shot him a grateful approving look and Frank felt something loosen in his chest. The look told him that the chill was over, this particular hatchet had been buried. Forever, he hoped.

Later, after the big yellow school bus had gobbled the twins up for the morning, Jamia came to him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed his mouth gently. "You were very sweet to do that," she said, "and I'm sorry I was such a bitch."

Frank returned her kiss, feeling a little uncomfortable nonetheless. It occurred to him that the I'm sorry I was such a bitch statement, while by no means a standard, was not exactly something he'd never heard before either. It usually came after Jamia had gotten her way.

Miles, meanwhile, had toddled unsteadily over to the front door and was looking out the lowest pane of glass at the empty road. "Bus!"

"He's growing up fast." Frank said.

Jamia nodded. "Too fast to suit me, I think."

"Wait until he's out of diapers." Frank said. "Then he can stop."

She laughed and it was all right between them again. She stood back, made a minute adjustment to his tie, and looked him up and down critically.

"Do I look good?" He asked.

"You look very nice."

"Yeah, I know. But do I look like a heart surgeon? A two hundred thousand dollar a year man?"

"No ,just you." She giggled. "The rock and roll animal."

Frank glanced at his watch. "The rock and roll animal has got to put on his shoes and go." He said.

"Are you nervous?"

"Yeah, a little."

"Don't be." She said. "It's sixty seven thousand dollars a yearfor putting on Ace bandages, prescribing for the flu and for hangovers, giving girls the pill—" 

"Don't forget the condoms." Frank said, smiling again. One of the things that had surprise him on his first tour of the infirmary had been the supplies of Trojans, which seemed to him enormous.

The head nurse had smiled cynically. "Off campus apartments in the area are pretty tacky. You'll see."

He supposed he will.

"Have a good day," she said and kissed him again, lingering. But when she pulled away, she was mock stern.  "And for fuck's sake remember that you're an administrative, not an intern or a second year resident!"

"Yes, doctor." Frank said humbly and they both laughed again.


	6. I Don't Remember How I Looked Before He Got To Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "some kind of heart transplant or maybe a lobotomy"

The first thing he noticed turning into the university grounds was how suddenly and spectacularly the traffic swelled. There was car traffic, bike traffic, there were joggers by the score. He had to stop quickly to avoid two of the latter coming from the direction of East Hall. 

Frank braked hard enough to lock his shoulder belt and honked. He was always annoyed at the way joggers seemed to automatically assume that their responsibility lapsed completely at the moment they began to run. They were, after all, exercising. One of them gave Frank the finger without even looking around. Frank sighed and drove on.

The second thing was that the ambulance was gone from it's slot in the small infirmary parking lot and that gave him a nasty start. The infirmary was equipped to treat almost any illness or accident on a short term basis. There were three well equipped examination and treatment rooms opening off the big foyer and beyond this were two wards with fifteen beds each. But there was no operating theater, nor anything even resembling one. In case of serious accidents, there was the ambulance, which would rush an injured or seriously ill person to the Northern Jersey Medical Center. 

Matt Skiba, the physcian's assistant who had given Frank his first tour of the facility, had shown Frank the log from the previous two academic years with justifiable pride,there had only been thirty eight ambulance runs in that time...not bad when you considered that the student population here was over ten thousand and the total university population was almost seventeen thousand.

And here he was, on his first day of real work, with the ambulance gone.

He parked in the slot headed with a freshly painted sign reading Reserved For Dr. Iero and hurried in.

He found Ashley Costello, a lithe woman of about 27, in the first examining room, taking the temperature of a girl who was wearing jeans and a halter top. The girl had gotten a bad sunburn not too long ago, Frank observed, the peeling was well advanced.

"Good morning, Ash." He said. "Where's the ambulance?"

"Oh, we had a real tragedy, all right," Ashley said, taking the  thermometer out of the student's mouth and reading it. "Travis Barker came in this morning at seven and saw a great big puddle under the engine and the front wheels. Radiator let go. They hauled it away."

"Great," Frank said, but he felt relieved nonetheless. At least it wasn't out on a run, which was what he had first feared. "When do we get it back?"

Ash laughed. "Knowing the  University Motor Fund," she said. "It'll come back around December wrapped in Christmas paper." She glanced at the student. "You got half a degree of fever." She said. "Take two Tylenol and stay out of bars and dark alleys."

The girl got down.  She gave Frank a quick appraising glance and hen went out.

"Our first customer of the new semester." Ash said sourly. She began to shake the thermometer down with brisk snaps.

"You don't seemed too pleased about it."

"I know the type." She said. "Oh, we get the other type too- athletes who go on playing with bone chips and tendonitis and everything else because they don't want to be benched, they've got to be macho men, not let the team down, even if they're jeopardizing pro careers later on. Then you've got Little Miss Half Degree of Fever." She jerked her head toward the window, where Frank could see the girl with the peeling sunburn walking in the direction of the dorms. In the examination room the girl had given the impression of being someone who did not feel week at all but was trying not to let on. Now she was walking briskly, her hips swinging prettily, noticing and being noticed.

"Your basic college hyperchondraic." Ash dropped the thermometer into a sterilizer. "We'll see her two dozen times this year? Her visits will be more frequent before each round of prelims. A week or so before finals, she'll be convinced she has either mono or pneumonia. Bronchitis is the fall back position. She'll get out of four or five tests and get easier markups. They always get sicker if they know the prelim or final is going to be an objective test rather than an essay exam."

"Damn, aren't we cynical this morning." Frank said. 

She tipped him a wink that made him grin. "I don't take it to heart, Doctor. Neither should you."

"Where's Matt now?"

"In your office, answering mail and trying to figure out the latest bureaucratic bullshit from Blue Cross-Blue Shield." She said.

Frank went in. Ash's cynicism notwithstanding, he felt comfortable there.

**********

Looking back on it, the nightmare really began where they brought the dying boy, Gerard Way, into the infirmary around ten that morning.

Until then, things were very quiet. At nine, half an hour after Frank arrived, the two candy stripers who would be working the nine to three shift, came in. Frank gave them each a doughnut and a cup of coffee and talked to them for about fifteen minutes, outlining their duties and what was perhaps more important, what was beyond the scope of their duties. Then Ash took over. As she led them out of Frank's office, he heard her ask: "Either of you allergic to shit or puke? You'll see a lot of both here."

"Oh God." Frank murmured and covered his eyes. But he was smiling. A tough woman like Ash was not always a liability.

Frank began filing out the long insurance forms, which amounted to a complete inventory of drug stock and medical equipment. ("Every year." Matt said in an aggrieved voice. "Every goddamn year the same thing. Why don't you write down 'Complete heart transplant facility, approximately. value eight million dollars',Frank? That'll fool them!") And he was totally engrossed, thinking only marginally that a cup of coffee would go down well, when Skiba screamed from the direction of the waiting room: "Frank! Get out here! We got a mess!"

The near panic in Skiba's voice got Frank going in a hurry. He bolted out of his chair almost as if he had, in some subconscious way, been expecting this. A shriek, as thin and sharp as a shard of broken glass, arose from the direction of Skiba's shout. It was followed by a sharp slap and Ash saying "Stop that or get the hell out of here! Stop it right now!"

Frank burst into the waiting room and was first only conscious of the blood. One of the candy stripers were sobbing. The other had put her fisted hands to the corners of her mouth, pulling her lips into a big revolted grin. Skiba was kneeling down, trying to hold the head of the boy sprawled on the floor.

Matt looked up at Frank, eyes grim and wide and frightened. He tried to speak. Nothing came out.

"Shut the drapes." He snapped at the candy stripers who had screamed.

The candy stripers got in gear. A moment later green drapes were jerked across the windows. Ash and Skiba moved instinctively between the boy on the floor and the doors, cutting off the view as best they could.

"Hard stretcher, Doctor?" Ash asked.

"If we need it, get it." Frank said, squatting beside Skiba. "I haven't even had a chance to look at him."

"Come on." Ash said to the girl who had closed the drapes. She was pulling the corners of her mouth with her fists again, making that humorless, screaming grin. She looked at Ash and moaned. "Ugh."

"Yeah, ugh is right. Come on." She gave the girl a hard yank and got her moving, her red and white pinstripes skirt swishing against her legs.

Frank looked at his first patient at the University.

He was a young man, age approximately twenty, and it took Frank less than three seconds to make the only diagnosis that mattered. The young man was going to die. Half of his head was crushed. His neck had been broken. One collarbone jutted from his swelled and twisted right shoulder. From his head, blood and a yellow fluid seeped sluggishly into the carpet. Frank could see the man's brain, whitish-gray and pulsing through a shattered section of skull. It was like looking through a broken window. The incision was perhaps five centimeters wide. That he was still alive at all was incredible. In his mind he heard Nicole Dollanganger saying 'sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.' And his father: 'dead is dead'. He felt a crazy urge to laugh. Dead was dead, all right. That's affirmative, man.

"Yell for the ambulance." He snapped at Skiba. 

"Frank, the ambulance is in repairs."

"Oh fuck." Frank said, slapping his own forehead. He shifted his gaze to Ash. "What do you do in a case like this? Call Campus Security or an EMT?"

Ash looked flustered and upset. But her voice was composer enough as she replied. "Doctor, I don't know. We've never had a situation like this before in my time at the Medical Center."

Frank thought as fast as he could. "Call the campus police? We can't wait for the hospital to send out their own ambulance. If they have to, they can take him up to Newark in one of the fire engines. At least it has a siren. Go do it, Ash."

She went out but not before he caught her deeply sympathetic glance and interpreted it. This young man was going to die no matter what they did. He would be just as dead even if their ambulance had been parked out front with the motor idling when the patient was brought in.

Incredibly, the dying man was moving. His eyes fluttered and opened. Hazel eyes, the irises ringed with blood. They stared vacantly around, seeing nothing. He tried to move his head and Frank exerted pressure to keep him from doing so, mindful of the broken neck. The cranial trauma did not preclude the possibility of pain.

The hole in his head, oh fuck, the hole in his head.

"What happened to him?" He asked Matt, aware that it was, under the circumstances, a stupid and pointless question. The question of a bystander. But the hole in the man's head confirmed his status, a bystander was all he was? "Did the police bring him?"

"Some students brought him in a blanket sling. I don't know what the circumstances were."

There was what happened next to be thought of. That was his responsibility too. "Go out and find them." Frank said. "Take them around to the other door. I want them to see any more of this than they already have."

Skiba, looking relieved to be away from what was happening in here, went to the door and opened it, letting in a babble of excited, curious, confused conversation. Frank could also hear the warble of a police siren. Campus Security was here then. Frank felt a kind of miserable relief.

The dying man was making a gurgling sound in his throat. He tried to speak. Frank heard syllables but the words themselves were slurred and unclear.

Frank leaned over him and said, "You're going to be alright, dude."

Frank looked around and saw that he was momentarily alone with the dying man. Dimly he could hear Ash yelling at the candy stripers that the hard stretcher was in the supply closet off Room Two. Frank doubted if they knew Room Two was. The green wall to wall carpet was now soaked a muddy purple in an expanding circle around the young man's ruined head, the leaking of intracranial fluid had stopped.

"In the Pet Sematary." The young man croaked and began to grin. The grin was remarkably like the mirthless, hysterical grin of the candy stripers who had closed the drapes.

Frank stared down at him, at first refusing to credit what he had heard. Then Frank thought he must have had an auditory hallucination. He made some more of those phonetic sounds and my subconscious made them into something coherent, cross patched the sounds into my own experience. But that was not what had happened and a moment later he was forced to realize it. A swooning, mad terror struck him and his flesh began to creep avidly, seeming to actually move up and down his arms and along his stomach in waves...but even then he simply refused to believe it. Yes, the syllables had been on the bloody lips of the man on the carpet as well in Frank's ears, but that only meant the hallucination had been visual as well auditory.

"What did you say?" He whispered.

And this time, as clear as the words of a speaking parrot or a crow whose tongue had been split, the words were unmistakable: "It's not the real cemetery." The eyes were vacant, not seeing, rimmed with blood: the mouth grinning the large grin of a dead carp.

Horror rolled through Frank, gripping his warm heart in it's cold hands, squeezing. It reduced him, made him less and less, until he felt like taking to his heels and running from this bloody, twisted, speaking head on the floor of the infirmary waiting room. He was a man with no deep religious training, no bent toward the superstitious or the occult. He was ill prepared for this...whatever it was.

Fighting the urge to run with everything in him, he forced himself to lean even closer. "What did you say?" He asked a second time.

The grin. That was bad.

"The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Frank." The dying man whispered. "A man grows what he can...and tends it."

"Who are you?" Frank asked in a trembling, paper voice. "Who are you?"

"They bring my fish."

"How did you know my-"

"Keep clear, us. Know-"

"You-"

"Why." The young man said and now Frank could smell the scent of death on his breath, internal injuries, lost rhythm, failure, ruin.

"What?" A crazy urge came to shake him.

The young man began to shudder all over. Suddenly he seemed to freeze with every muscle locked. His eyes lost their vacant expression momentarily and seemed to find Frank's eyes. Then everything let go at once. Then the eyes rescued their vacant expression and began to glaze. The man was dead.

Frank sat back, vaguely aware that all his clothes we're sticking to him, he was drenched with sweat. Darkness bloomed, spreading awning softly over his eyes and the world began to swing sickeningly sideways. Recognizing what was happening, he half turned from the dead man, thrust his head down between his knees, and pressed the nails of his left thin and left forefinger into his gums hard enough to bring blood.

After a moment the world began to clear again.


	7. I Will Never End Up Like Him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "peroxide princess shine with sharp teeth"

Things did not slow down until nearly four that afternoon, after Frank made a statement to the press. 

The young man, Gerard Way, had been jogging with his brother and his fiancee. A car driven by a drunk driver had come up the road leading from Coopertown toward the center of campus at an excessive speed. The car had struck Gerard and driven him head first into a tree. Gerard had been brought to the infirmary in a blanket by his brother. He had died minutes later. The driver was being held under pending charges of reckless driving, driving under the influence, and vehicular manslaughter.

The editor of the campus newspaper asked if he could say that Gerard has died of head injuries. Frank, thinking of that broken window through which the brain itself could be seen, said he would rather let the Gradyville city coroner announce the cause of death. The editor then asked if the boy who had brought Gerard to the infirmary might not have inadvertently caused his death.

"No," Frank replied. "Not at all. Unhappily, Mr. Way was, in my opinion, mortally wounded upon being struck."

There were other questions but that answer really ended the press conference. Now Frank sat in his office trying to pick up the shards of the day-or maybe he was just trying to cover what had happened, to paint a thin coating of routine over it.

Perhaps the lowest point of the afternoon had cone just after Skiba left. Ash came in and laid a pink memo slip on Frank's desk. 'Bangor Carpet will be here at 9:00 tomorrow,' it read.

"Carpet?" He had asked.

"It will have to be replaced." She said apologetically. "No way the stain going to come out, Doctor."

He was cruising fairly well when the night nurse poked her head in and said, "Your wife, Dr. Iero. Line one."

Frank glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly five thirty. He had meant to be out of here an hour and a half ago.

"Okay thanks."

He picked up the phone and punched line one. "Hi, honey. Just on my-"

"Frank, are you all right?"

"Yeah fine."

****

He thought perhaps he would like awake, as he often had when he was interning, and days that were particularly terrible would play over and over in his mind. But he slid smoothly toward sleep, as if on a sightly inclined, frictionless board. He had read somewhere that it takes the average human being just seven minutes to turn off all the switches and uncouple from the day. Seven minutes for conscious and subconscious to revolve, like the trick wall in an amusement park haunted house. Something a little eerie in that.

He was almost there when he heard Jamia say, as if from great distance, "...day after tomorrow."

"Hmm?"

"The vet. He's taking Sweet Pea the day after tomorrow."

"Oh." 'Treasure your balls while you got em, old girl.' Then he slipped away from everything, down a hole, sleeping deeply and without dreams.

***

Something woke him much later, a crash loud enough to cause him to sit up in bed, wondering if one of the girls had fallen onto the floor or if maybe Miles's crib had collapsed. Then the moon sailed out from behind a cloud, flooding the room with cold white light, and he saw Gerard Way standing in the doorway. The crash had been Gerard throwing open the door.

He stood there with his head bashed in behind the left temple. The blood had dried on his face in maroon stripes like cat scratches. His collarbone jutted whitely. He was grinning.

"Come on doctor." Gerard said. "We got places to go."

Frank looked around. His wife was a vague bump under the grey comforter, sleeping deeply. He looked back at Gerard, who was dead but somehow not dead. Yet Frank felt no fear. He realized why almost at once.

'It's a dream,' he thought, and it was only in his relief that he realized he had been frightened after all. 'The dead do not return; it is physiologically impossible. This young man is in an autopsy drawer in Newark with the pathologist's tattoo on him. The pathologist probably tossed his brain into his chest cavity after taking a tissue sample and filled up the skull cavity with brown paper to prevent leaking'. But Gerard was not here. Gerard was in a refrigerated locker with a tag around his toe. 

Yet the compulsion to get up was strong. Gerard's eyes were upon him.

He threw back the covers and swung himself on to the floor. The dream had a remarkable reality. It was so real that he would not follow Gerard until Gerard had turned and begun to go back down the stairs. The compulsion to follow was strong, but he did not want to be touched, even in a dream, by a walking corpse.

But he did follow.

They crossed the living room, dining room, kitchen. Frank expected Gerard to turn the lock and then lift he latch on the door which connected the kitchen to the shed were he garaged the cars, but Gerard did no such thing.  Instead of opening the door, he simply passed through it. 

He tried it himself and was not amused to meet only with the unyielding door. Apparently he was a hard headed realist, even in his dreams. Frank twisted the knob on the Yalelock, lifted the latch, and let himself into the garage. Gerard was not there. Frank wondered briefly if Gerard had just ceased to exist. Figures in dreams often just did that.

But when Frank emerged from the garage, he saw him again, standing in the faint moonlight at the back of the lawn-at the head of the path.

Now fear came, entering softly, sifting through the hollow places of his body and filling them up with dirty smoke. He didn't want to go ahead. He halted.

Gerard glanced back over his shoulder, and in the moonlight he eyes were silver. Frank felt a hopeless crawl of horror in his stomach. That jutting bone, those dried clots of blood. But it was hopeless to resist those eyes. This was apparently a dream about being hypnotized, being unable to change things, perhaps, the way he had been unable to change the fact of Gerard's death. You could go to school for twenty years and you still couldn't do a thing when they brought in a guy who had been rammed into a tree hard enough to open scratches in his face.

And even as these thoughts passed through his mind, he was drawn forward on to the path.

He didn't like this dream. Oh God, not at all. It was too real. The cold nubbles in the rug, the way he had not been able to pass through the shed door when a person could be able to walk through doors and walks in any self respecting dream... and now the cool brush of dew on his bare feet, and the feel of the night wind, just a breath of it. Once under the trees, pine needles stuck to the soles of his feet...another little detail that was just a bit more real than it needed to be.

'Never mind. Never mind. I am home in my own bed. It's just a dream, no matter how vivid, and like all other dreams, it will seem ridiculous in the morning. My waking mind will discover it's inconsistencies.'

The small branch of a dead tree poked his bicep and he winced. Up ahead, Gerard was only a moving shadow, and now Frank's terror seemed to have crystalized into a bright sculpture in his mind: 'I am following a dead man into the woods, I am following a dead man up to the Pet Sematary, and this is no dream. God help me, this is no dream. This is happening.'

They walked down the far side of the wooded hill. The path curved in lazy s-shapes between the trees and then plunged into the underbrush.

He tried desperately to hold on to the dream idea.

They reached the clearing, and the moon sailed free of it's reef of clouds again, bathing the graveyard with ghastly effulgence. The leaning markers stood out with three dimensional clarity, casting shadows perfectly black and defined.

Gerard stopped near Callie The Cat, She Was Obediant and turned back toward Frank. The horror, the terror-he felt these things would grow in him until his body blew apart under their soft yet implacable pressure. Gerard was grinning. His bloody lips were wrinkled back from his teeth, and his pale skin in the moonlight had become overlaid with the white of a corpse about to be seen into it's winding shroud.

He lifted one arm and pointed. Frank looked in that direction. His eyes grew wide, and he crammed his knuckles against his mouth. There was coolness on his cheeks, and he realized that in the extremity of his terror he had begun to weep.

The deadfall from which Nicole Dollanganger had called Lily in alarm had become a heap of bones. The bones were moving. They writhed and clicked together, mandibles and femurs and ulnas and molars and incisors; he saw the grinning skulls of humans and animals. Fingernails cluttered. Here the remains of a foot flexed it's pallid joints.

Ah, it was moving. It was creeping-

Gerard was walking toward him now, his bloody face grim in the moonlight, and the last of Frank's coherent mind began to slip away in a yammering, cyclic thought: 'You got to scream yourself awake doesn't matter if you scare Jamia Cherry Lily Miles wake the whole household the whole neighborhood got to scream yourself awake screamscreamyourselfawakeawakeawake-'

But only a thin whisper of air would come. It was the sound of a little kid sitting on a stoop somewhere and trying to teach himself to whistle.

Gerard came close and then spoke.

"The door must not be opened." Gerard said. There was a look on his face that Frank mistook for compassion. It wasn't really compassion at all; only a dreadful kind of patience. Still he pointed at the moving pile of bones. "Don't go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and restless. Remember."

Frank tried again to scream. He could not.

"I come as a friend." Gerard said-but was friend actually the word Gerard had used? Frank thought not. It was as if Gerard had spoken in a foreign language which Frank could understand through some dream magic...and "friend" was as close to whatever word Gerard had actually used that Frank's struggling mind could come. "Your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near." He was close enough for Frank to smell death on him.

Gerard, reaching for him.

The soft, maddening click of the bones.

Frank began to overbalance in his effort to get away from that hand. His own hand struck a monument and tilted it into the earth. Gerard's face, leaning down, filled the sky.

"Remember."

Frank tried to scream, and the world whirled away-but still he heard the click of moving bones in the moonlight crypt of the night.


	8. We Watch You Rise And Shine Forever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'll do most anything cause I don't care"

When the rep from Hoboken didn't turn promptly at ten, Frank gave in and called the registrar's office. He spoke with a Mrs. Diamandis, who said she would send over a copy of Gerard Way's records immediately. When Frank hang up, the Hoboken guy was there. He didn't try to give Frank anything, only asked him if he had any interest in buying a season ticket to the New England Patriots games at a discount.

"Nope." Frank said.

"I don't think you would," the Hoboken guy said glumly and left.

At noon Frank walked up to McDonald's and got a wrap and a Coke. He brought them back to his office and ate lunch while going over Gerard's records. He was looking for some connection with himself or with Gradyville, where the Pet Sematary was...a vague belief, he supposed, that there must be some sort of rational explanation even for such a weird occurrence as this. Maybe the guy had grown up in Gradyville- had, maybe, even buried a dog or a cat up there.

He didn't find the connection he was looking for. Gerard was from Belleville and had come to Gradyville to study graphic design. In those few typed sheets, Frank could see no possible connection between himself and the young man who had died in the reception room-other than the mortal one, of course. 

He sucked the last coke out of his cup, listening to the straw crack in the bottom, and then tossed all his trash into the wastebasket. Lunch had been light, but he had eaten it with good appetite. Nothing much wrong with the way he felt, really. Not now. There had been no recurrence of the shakes, and now even that morning horror began to seem more like a nasty, pointless surprise, dreamlike itself, of no consequence.

He drummed his fingers on the blotter, shrugged, and picked up the phone again. He dialed the EMMC and asked for the morgue.

After he was connected with the pathology clerk, he identified himself and said, "You have one of our students there, Gerard Way-"

"Not anymore," the voice at the other end said. "He's gone."

Frank's throat closed. At last he managed, "What?"

"His body was flown back to his parents last night. Guy from Evans Mortuary came and took custody. They put him on Delta, uh, Delta Flight 109. Where do you think he went? Shopping at the mall?"

"No," Frank said. "No, of course not. It's just..." It was just what? What the hell was he doing pursuing this, anyway? There was no sane way to deal with it. It had to be let go, marked off, forgotten. Anything else was asking for a lot of pointless trouble. "It's just that it seemed very quick." He finished lamely.

"Well, he was autopsied yesterday afternoon at around three twenty by Dr. Evans. By then his father had made all the arrangements. I imagine the body got to Newark by two in the morning."

"Oh. Well, in that case-"

"Unless one of the carriers screwed up and sent it somewhere else." The pathology clerk said brightly. "We've had that happen, you know, although never with Delta. Delta is pretty good. We had a guy who died on a fishing trip in NYC. Asshole strangled on a pop top while he was chugging a can of beer. But there was a screw up. They shipped him first to Miami, then to Des Moines, then to Fargo. Finally somebody wised up, but by then another three days had gone by. Nothing took. They might as well have injected him with Kool Aid instead of Jaundaflo. That guy was totally black and smelled rotten. That's what I heard, anyway. Six baggage handlers got sick."

The voice on the other end of the line laughed heartily.

Frank closed his eyes and said, "Well, thank you-"

"I can give you Dr. Evans's home phone if you want it, but he usually plays golf in the morning."

"That's okay." Frank said.

He hung up the phone. 'Let that put paid to it,' he thought. 'When you were having that crazy dream, or whatever it was, Gerard's body was almost certainly in a funeral home. That closes it off, let that be the end of it.'  
****

Driving home that afternoon, a simple explanation of the filth at the foot of the bed finally occured to him, flooding him with relief.

He had experienced an isolated incident of sleepwalking, brought on by the unexpected and extremely upsetting happenstance of having a student mortally injured and hen dying in his infirmary during his first real day on the job.

It explained everything. The dream had seemed extremely real because large parts of it were real-the feel of the carpet, the cold dew, and, of course, the dead branch that had scratched his arm. It explained why Gerard had been able to walk through the door and he had not.

A picture rose in his mind, a picture of Jamia coming downstairs last night and catching him bumping against the back door, trying in his sleep to walk through it. The thought made him grin. It would have given her a hell of a turn, all right.

With the sleepwalking hypothesis in mind, he was able to analyze the causes of the dream-and he did so with a certain eagerness. He had walked to the Pet Sematary because it had become associated with another moment of recent stress. It had in fact been the cause of a serious argument between him and his wife...and also, he thought with growing excitement, it was associated in his mind with his kids first encounter with the idea of death-something his subconscious must have been grappling with last night when he went to bed.

'Damn lucky I got back to the house okay-I don't even remember that part. Must have come back on autopilot.'

It was a good thing he had. He couldn't imagine what it would have been like to have awakened this morning by the grave of Callie The Cat, disoriented, covered with dew, and probably scared shitless.

But it was over now.

*****

That evening, with Jamia ironing and the kids engrossed with SpongeBob, Frank told Jamia casually that he believed he might go for a short walk.

"Will you be back in time to help me put Miles to bed?" She asked without looking up from her ironing. "You know he goes better when you're there."

"Sure." He said.

"Where you going, daddy?" Cherry asked, not looking away from the TV.

"Just out back, hon."

"Oh."

Frank went out.

Fifteen minutes later he was in the Pet Sematary, looking around curiously and coping with a strong feeling of Deja Vu. That he had been here was beyond doubt; the little grave marker put up to honor the memory of Callie The Cat was knocked over. He had done that when the vision of Gerard approached, near the end of what he could remember of the dream. Frank righted it absently and walked over to the deadfall.

He didn't like it. The memory of all these weather whitened branches and dead trees turning into a pile of bones still had the power to chill. He forced himself to reach out and touch one. Balanced precariously on the jackstraw pile, it rolled and fell, bouncing down the side of the heap. Frank jumped back a step before it could touch his shoe.

He walked along the deadfall, first to the left, then to the right. On both sides the underbrush closed in so thickly as to be impentrable. Nor was it the kind of brush you'd try to push your way through-not if you were smart, Frank thought. There were lush masses of poison ivy growing close to the ground (all his life Frank heard people boast that they were immune to the stuff, but he knew that almost no one really was), and farther in were some of the biggest, most wicked looking throns he had ever seen.

Frank strolled back to the rough center of the deadfall. He looked at it, hands stuck in the back pockets of his jeans.

'You're not going to try to climb that, aren't you?'

'Not me, boss. Why would I want to do a stupid thing like that?'

'Great. Had me worried for just a minute there, Frank. Looks like a good way to land in your own infirmary with a broken ankle, doesn't it?'

'Sure does! Also, it's getting dark.'

Sure that he was all together and in total agreement with himself, Frank began to climb the dead fall.

He was halfway up when he felt it shift under his feet with a peculiar creaking sound.

'Roll dem bones, Doc.'

When the pile had shifted again, Frank began to clamber back down. The tail of his shirt had pulled out of his pants.

He reached solid ground without incident and dusted crumbled bits of bark off his hands. He walked back to the head of the path which would return him to his house-to his children who would return him to his house-to his children who would want a story before bed, to Sweet Pea, who was enjoying his last day as a card carrying wild dog, to tea in the kitchen with his wife after the kids were down.

He surveyed the clearing again before leaving, struck by it's green silence. Tendrils of ground fog had appeared from nqowhere and we're beginning to wind around the markers. The concentric circles...as if, all unknowing, the childish hands of Gradyville's generations had built a kind of scale model Stonehenge.

'But, Frank, is this all?'

Although he had gotten only the baredt glimpse over the top of the deadfall before the shifting sensation had made him nervous, he could have sworn there was a path beyond, leading deeper into the woods.

'No business of yours, Frank. You've got to let this go.'

'Okay, boss.'

Frank turned and headed home.

*****

He stayed up that night an hour after Jamia went to bed, reading a stack of medical jornals he had already been through, refusing to admit that the thought of going to bed-going to sleep-made him nervous. He had never had an episode of somnambulism before, and there was no way to be sure it was an isolated incident...until it did or didn't happen again. He heard Jamia get out of bed, and then she called down softly, "Frank? Honey? You coming up?" "Just was," he said, turning out the lamp over his study desk and getting up.

It took a great deal longer than seven minutes to shut the machine down that night. Listening to Jamia draw the long, calm breaths of deep sleep besides him, the apparation of Gerard seemed less dreamlike. He would close his eyes and see the door crashing open and there he was, Our Special Guest Star, Gerard Way, standing there in his suit, his collarbone poking up.

He would slide down toward sleep, think about how it would be to come fully, codly awake in the Pet Sematary, to see those roughly concentric circles litten by moonlight, to have to walk back, awake, along the path through the word. He would think these things and then snap fully awake. 

It was sometimes after midnight when sleep finally crept up on his bliend side and bagged him. There was no dreams. He woke up promptly at seven thirty, to the sound of cold autumn rain beating against the window. He threw the sheets back with some apprehension. The ground sheet on his bed was flawless.


	9. Heal Me Up Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "like vomit our ghosts will all spill out"

A sitter kept Miles while Jamia ran Sweet Pea to the vet's office. That night Lily stayed awake until after eleven, complaining that she couldn't sleep without Sweet Pea and calling for glass after glass of water. Finally Frank refused to let her have any more on the grounds that she would wet the bed. This caused a crying tantrum of such ferocity that Frank and Jamia stared at each other blankly, eyebrows raised.

"She's scared for Sweet Pea," Jamia said. "Let her work it out."

"She's can't keep it up at that pitch for long," Frank said. "I hope."

He was right. Lily's hoarse, angry cries became hitches and groans. Finally there was silence. When Frank went up to check up on her, he found she was sleeping on the floor with her arms wrapped tightly around the dog bed that Sweet Pea hardly ever slept in.

He removed it from her arms, put her back in bed, brushed her hair back from her sweaty brow gently, and kissed her. On impulse he went into the small room that served as Jamia's office, wrote a quick note in large block letters on a sheet of paper-I WILL BE BACK TOMORROW LOVE, SWEET PEA- and pinned it to the cushion on the bottom of the dog bed. 

***  
Sweet Pea returned home on the Friday of Frank's first full week of work; Cherry and Lily used their allowance to buy her a box of dog treats, and nearly slapped Miles once for trying to touch him. This made Miles cry in a way mere parental discipline could never have done. Receiving a rebuke from the twins was like receiving a rebuke from god.

Looking at Sweet Pea made Frank feel sad. It was ridiculous, but that didn't change the emotion. There was no sign of Sweet Pea's former feistiness. No more did she walk like a gunslinger; now her walk was the slow, careful walk of the convalescent. He allowed the girls to hand feed her. She showed no sign of wanting to go outside, not even to the garage. He had changed. Perhaps it was ultimately for the better that she had changed.

***  
Indian summer came and went. Brazen color came into the trees, briefly, and then faded. After one cold, driving rain in mid October, the leaves started to fall. The twins began to arrive home laden with Halloween decorations they had made at school and entertained Miles with the story of the Headless Horseman. Miles spent that evening babbling happily about somebody named Itchybod Brain. Jamia got giggling and couldn't stop. It was a good time for them, that early autumn.

Frank's work at the University had settled into a demanding but pleasant routine. He saw patients, he attended meetings of the Council of Colleges, he wrote the obligatory letters to the student newspaper, advising the university's co Ed population of the confidentiality of the infirmary's treatment for VD and exhorting the student population to get flu boosters, as the A type was apt to be prevalent again that winter. He sat on panels. He chaired panels. During the second week in October he went to the New Jersey Conference on College and University Medicine in Newark and presented a paper on the legal ramifications of student treatment. The paper was well received. He began working up the infirmary budget for the next academic year.

His evenings fell into a routine: kids after supper, a beer or two with Nicole Dollanganger later. Sometimes Jamia came over with him if the babysitter was available to sit for an hour, and sometimes Dan joined them, but mostly it was just Frank and Nicole. Frank found the woman as comfortable as an old slipper, and he would talk about Gradyville history going back three hundred years almost as though he had lived all of it. She talked but never rambled. She never bored Frank, although he had seen Jamia yawning under her hand on more than one occasion.

The nasty death of Gerard Way on the first day of the fall semester began to fade in the memory of the student body and in Frank's own; Gerard's family no doubt still grieved. Frank had spoken to the tearful, mercifully faceless voice of Gerard's mother on the phone; the mother had only wanted assurance that Frank had done everything he could, and Frank had assured him that everyone involved had. He did not tell him of the confusion, the spreading stain on the carpet, and how his son had been dead almost from the instant he was brought in, although these were things that Frank thought he himself would never forget. But for those to whom Gerard was only a casualty, he had already dimmed.

Frank still remembered the dream and the sleepwalking incident that had accompanied it, but it now seemed almost as if it had happened to someone else, or on a television show he had once watched. His one visit to a hooker in Chicago six years ago seemed like that now; they were equally unimportant, side trips which held a false resonance, like sounds produced in an echo chamber.

He did not think at all about what Gerard had or had not said.

****

There was a hard frost on Halloween night. Frank and Jamia began at the Dollanganger's. Cherry and Lily cackled satisfyingly, pretending to race each other on their matching brooms around Nicole's kitchen, and was duly pronounced "Just the cutest thing I ever saw...aren't they, Dan?"

Dan agreed that they were and lit a cigarette. "Where's Miles? Thought you have him dressed up too."

They had indeed planned on taking Miles around-but Miles had come down with a troublesome, bronchial cold, and after listening to his lungs, which sounded a bit rattly, and consulting Google, Frank had nixed it. Jamia, although disappointed, had agreed.

Lily had promised to give Miles some of her candy, but the exaggerated quality of her sorrow made Frank wonder if she wasn't just a bit glad that Miles wouldn't be able to slow her down...or steal part of the limelight.

"Poor Miles." She has said in toes usually reserved for those suffering with terminal illnesses. Miles, unaware of what he was missing, sat on the couch watching TV with Sweet Pea snoozing beside him.

"Cherry witch." Miles had replied without a great deal of interest and went back to the TV.

"Poor Miles." Lily had said again, fetching another sigh. Frank thought of crocodile tears and grinned. Lily grabbed his hand and started pulling him. "Let's go, daddy."

***  
"Miles has got the flu." Frank said to Nicole now.

"Well, that's a shame." Nicole said. "But it mean more to him next year. Hold out your bag, Cherry...shit!"

She had taken a Snickers bar out of the treat bowl on the table, but it had fallen out of her hand.

"Let me go get you another Snickers, honey." She said.

"It's fine." Frank said, trying to drop it into Cherry's bag, but Cherry stepped away holding her bag protectively shut.

"I don't want a Snickers, daddy." She said, looking at her father as if he might have gone mad. 

"Cherry, that's impolite!"

"Don't scold her for the truth, Frank." Nicole said. "Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children."

"Thank you, Mrs. Dollanganger." Cherry said, casting a vindicated eye on her father.

"You're very welcome, honey." Nicole said.

Nicole escorted them out to the porch. Two little ghosts were coming up the walk, and the twins recognized them both as friends from school. They took the ghosts back to the kitchen, and for a moment Nicole and Frank were alone on the porch.

"His depression has gotten worse." Nicole said. "It comes down harder on him every fall and winter, but this is the worst it's ever been."

"What does his therapist say?"

"Nothing. He can't say nothing because Dan hasn't been back to see him."

"What? Why not?"

Nicole looked at Frank, and in the light cast by the headlamps of the station wagon waiting for the ghosts, she looked oddly defenseless. "I'd meant to ask you this at a better time, Frank, but I guess there isn't no good time to impose on a friendship. Would you talk to him?"

From the kitchen, Frank could hear the two ghosts booing and his daughters cackling again. It all sounded very fine and Halloweenish.

"What else is wrong with Dan?" He asked. "Is he afraid of something else, Nicole?"

"He's been acting very introverted lately." Nicole said in a low voice. "He won't go see his therapist or any doctor anymore. I'm a little worried."

"Is Dan worried?"

Nicole hesitated and then said, "I think he's scared. I think that's why he doesn't want to go to a doctor."

"I'd be happy to talk to him." Frank said. "No problem at all."

"Thank you." Nicole said gratefully. "If we catch him one night, gang up on him, I think-"

Frank couldn't remember later exactly how one emotion slipped into the next. Trying to analyze it only made him feel dizzy. All he could remember for sure was that curiosity changed swiftly into a feeling that somewhere something had gone badly wrong. His eyes met Nicole's, both unguarded. It was a moment before he could find a way to act.

"Boo!" The Halloween ghosts in the kitchen chanted. "Boo!" And then suddenly the sound was gone and the cry rose louder, genuinely frightening: "Oooo!"

And then one of the ghosts began to screamed.

"Daddy!" Lily's voice was wild with alarm. "Daddy! Mr. Dollanganger is bleeding!"

"Danny!" Nicole yelled.

Cherry came running out with Lily in tow onto the porch, her black dress flapping. She clutched her broom in one hand. Their faces pulled long in dismay. The two little ghosts followed them, crying.

Nicole lunged through the door, amazingly spry for a petite woman. No, more than spry. Again, almost lithe. She was calling her husband's name.

Frank bent down and spoke to the girls. "Stay right here on the porch. Understand?"

"Daddy, I'm scared." Lily whispered.

The two ghosts barreled past them and ran down the walk, candy bags rattling, screaming.

Frank ran down the front hall and into the bathroom ignoring the twins, who were calling for him to come back.

The rest of this chapter is kinda graphic so if you're triggered by blood/suicide attempts I advise you to leave.

Dan laid on the hilly linoleum floor in a pile of blood and a broken shaving razor. Apparently he had stolen Nicole's razor, broke the blade out of it, and slit both of his wrists. Frank could see scars from what looked like previous attempts at self harm. Nicole was tugging at her sleeves, and she looked at Frank with tears down her face.

"Help me, please." She sobbed. "Help him! He's dying!"

"Hand me some shirts!" He said. Nicole left and came back with a pile of shirts. Frank took the shirts and tied them around Dan's wrists as a makeshift tourniquet. 

He felt for Dan's pulse and got something that's weak, thready, and rapid-not really a beat but only simple spasms. Extreme arrythmia, well on the way to full cardiac arrest.

He opened the bloody shirt and began administering CPR.

"Nicole, listen to me." He said. Heel of the left hand one third of the way up the breastbone-four centimeters above the xyphoid process. Right hand gripping the left wrist, bracing, lending pressure. 'Keep it firm, but let's take it easy on the ribs-no need to panic yet. And for fuck's sake, don't collapse the lungs.'

"I'm here." Nicole said.

"Take the girls." He said. "Go across the street. Carefully-don't get hit by a car. Tell Jamia what happened? Tell her I want my bag. Not the one in the study, but the one on the high shelf in the upstairs bathroom. She'll know the one. Tell her to call for an ambulance."

Nicole went. Frank heard the screen door bang? He was alone with Dan and the metallic smell of blood. From the living room came the steady tick of the seven day clock.

Dan suddenly uttered a long, steady breath. His eyelids fluttered. And Frank was suddenly dousee with a cold, horrid certainty. 

'He's gonna open his eyes...oh fuck he's going to open his eyes and start talking about the Pet Sematary.'

But he only looked at Frank with a muddled sort of recognition, and then his eyes closed again. Frank was ashamed of himself of himself and this stupid fear that was so unlike him. At the saetime he felt hope and relief. There had been some pain in his eyes but not agony.

Frank was breathing hard now and sweating. No one but TV paramedics could make CPR look easy. A good steady closed chest massage popped a lot of calories, and the webbing between his arms and shoulders would ache tomorrow.

"Can I do anything?"

He looked around. A woman dressed in blue jeans and a brown sweater stood hesitantly in the doorway, one hand clutched into a fist between her breasts. 

"No," he said, and then: "Yes. Wet a cloth, please. Wring it out. Put it on his forehead."

She moved to do it. Frank looked down. Dan's eyes were open again.

"Frank, I feel sick." He whispered. "I want to take a nap."

"You had quite an event." Frank said. "You just missed an artery. Now relax and don't talk, Dan."

He rested for a moment and then took Dan's pulse again. The beat was too fast. He was Morse coding: his heart would beat regularly, then run briefly in a series of beats that was almost but not quite fibrillation, and then began to beat regularly again. It was not good, but it was better than cardiac arrhythmia.

The woman came over with the cloth and put it on Dan's forehead. She stepped away uncertainty. Nicole came back in with Frank's bag.

"Frank?" 

"He's gonna be fine," Frank said, looking at Nicole. "Ambulance coming?"

"Your wife is calling them." Nicole said. "I didn't stay around."

"No...hospital." Dan whispered.

"Yes hospital." Frank said. "Suicide Watch. If you say anything else, I'll make you eat all these apples. Cores and all."

He smiled wanly, than closer his eyes again.

Frank opened his bag, rummaged, foud the Isodil, and shook one of the pills, so tiny it easier would have fit on a fingernail, into the palm of his hand. He recapped the bottle and pinched the pill between his fingers.

"Dan, can you hear me?"

"Yes."

"Want you to open your mouth. You did your trick, now you get your treat. I'm going to put a pill under your tongue. Just a small one. I want you to hold it there until it dissolves. It's going to taste a little bitter but never mind that. All right?"

He opened his mouth. Stale breath wafted out, and Frank felt a moment of aching sorrow for him, lying here on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.

He settled his tongue over he pill and grimaced a little. The pill tasted a little bitter, all right. It always did. But he was no Gerard, beyond help and beyond reach. He thought Dan was going to live to fight another day. His hand groped the air and Nicole took it gently.

Frank got up then, found the overturned bowl, and began to pick up the treats. The woman, who introduced herself as Mrs. Grant from down the road, helped him and then said she thought she had better go back to the car.

"Thanks for your help, Mrs. Grant." Frank said.

"I didn't do anything." She said flatly. "But I thank God you were here, Dr. Iero."

"That goes for me, too." Nicole said. Her eyes were watery and red." "I owe you one."

"No problem."

"When you need a favor, you see me first."

"All right." Frank said. "I'll do that."


	10. You Get What Everyone Else Gets. You Get A Lifetime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shorter chapter but I was really busy with Christmas rip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'm taking back the life you stole"

The ambulance arrived twenty minutes later. As Frank stood outside watching the orderlies load Dan into the back, he saw Jamia looking out the living room window. He waved to her. She lifted a hand in return. 

He and Nicole stood together and watched the ambulance pull away, lights flashing, siren silent.

"Guess I'll go to the hospital now." Nicole said.

"They won't let you see him tonight. They'll want to run some tests on him and then put him in suicide watch. No visitors for 72 hours."

"Is he gonna be okay, Frank?"

Frank shrugged. "No one can guarantee that. For whatever it's worth, I think he's going to be fine. Maybe better than ever, once he gets on some medication."

"Hm." Nicole mumbled, lighting a cigarette.

Frank glanced at his watch. He was shocked to see it was only 7:50. It seemed that more time had gone by.

"Nicole, I want to go get the girls so they can finish their trick or treating."

"Sure. Tell them to get all the treats they can.'

"I will." Frank promised.

***

 

The twins were still in their matching witch costumes when Frank got home. Jamia had tried to persuade them into their pajamas, but they had resisted, holding out for the possibility that the game might yet be played out.

"It's gonna be late for them, Frank."

"We'll take the car," he said. "Come on, Jamia. They have been looking forward to this for a month."

"Well..." She smiled. "Is Dan all right?" 

"I think so." He felt good. Tired but good.

"It's lucky you were there. Almost like an angel was calling for you."

"I'll settle for luck." He grinned as the girls came back. "Are you ready, Witch Hazel?"

They yelled as they pulled on his sleeve, trying to drag him to the door.

On the way home with a bag of candy a hour later, Cherry startled him by saying, " Did I make Mr. Dollanganger bleed, daddy? When I didn't want the Snickers?"

Frank looked at her wondering where she got the superstitious idea from. That made him think of the Pet Semetary again and those badly drawn circles. 

"No, honey." He said. "When you were in with those two ghosts-"

"Those weren't ghosts, they were my friends."

"Well, when you were in with them, Mrs. Dollanganger was telling me that her husband wasn't feeling well. In fact, you might have been responsible for saving his life or at least for keeping it from being much worse."

Now it was Cherry's turn to look startled.

Frank nodded. "He needed a doctor, honey. I'm a doctor. But I was only there because it was your night to go trick or treating."

Lily interrupted and said. "But he'll probably die anyway. People who bleed usually die. Even if they live, pretty soon they keep bleeding and bleeding and bleeding until...boom!"

"And where did you learn these words of wisdom?"

Lily only shrugged.

Lily allowed him to carry in her bag of candy and Frank plundered her attitude. The thought of Sweet Pea's death had brought Cherry to near hysteria. But the thought of Dan dying...What had she said? Bleeding and bleeding until boom!

The kitchen was empty, but Frank could hear Jamia moving around upstairs. He set the candy down on the counter and said " It doesn't necessarily work that way, Lily. Dan wasn't bleeding that much and I was able to administer the treatment right away. I doubt if he was bleeding to death or not. He-"

"Oh, I know." Lily agreed, almost cheerfully. "But he's old and he'll die pretty soon anyway. Mrs. Dollanganger too. Can I have some candy before bed?"

"No." He said, looking at her thoughtfully. "Now go up and brush your teeth, honey."

***

When the house was settled and the girls were in their bunk beds, Jamia asked softly, "Was it bad for the girls? Were they upset?"

"Nope." He said. "They handled their selves very well. Lets just go to sleep, alright?"

That night, as they slept in their house and as Frank lay awake in his, there was another hard frost. The wind rose in the early morning, ripping most of the remaining leaves, which were now an uninteresting brown, from the trees.

The wind woke up Frank and he sat up in bed, mostly asleep and confused. There were footsteps on the stairs...slow, dragging steps. Gerard had came back. Only now, two months had passes. When the door opened he would see a bloody horror, the suit he wss buried in caked with dried blood and dirt, the scars reopening, flesh fallen away. 

Only his eyes were alive. Bright and alive. He didn't speak this time, his vocal cords were too decayed to produce the sounds. But his eyes...

"No." Frank breathed out, and the footsteps died out.

Frank got up, went to the door, and pulled it open, shaking in fear. Gerard would be there, waiting for him. 

He slowly opened the door and his eyes dotted back and forth checking for the walking corpse. He sighed in relief as he saw nothing but Sweet Pea curled up in a hallway corner.


	11. Booked Our Flights Those Years Ago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I love you more than I can ever scream"

The next day Frank called the psych unit at the hospital. Dan's condition was still listed as critical per hospital standards. Frank got a happier assessment from his doctor however. 

"I would call it sheer luck he missed an important artery." The doctor said. "Very minimal scarring. He owes you a lot, Dr. Iero."

On impulse, Frank stopped by the hospital later that week with a bouquet of flowers and found that Dan had been moved to a room downstairs. Nicole was with him.

Dan laughed at the flowers and buzzed a nurse for a vase. Then he directed Nicole until they were in water, arranged to his specifications and placed on the dresser in the corner.

"Well, asshole over here is feeling so much better now." Nicole said sarcastically after she moved the flowers for the third time.

"You love me for it." Dan replied.

"Unfortunately I do."

At last Dan looked at Frank. "I want to thank you for what you did." He said with a shyness that was unaffected and a bit embarrassing. "Nicole says I owe you my life."

Embarrassed, Frank said "Nicole exaggerates."

"Not all the time." Nicole said. She loves looked at Frank, almost smiling but not quite. "Didn't your mother tell you to never mess up a thank you?"

She hadn't said anything about that, at least not that Frank could remember, but he believed she had said something once about false modesty being half the sin of pride.

"Dan." He said. "Anything I could do, I will do it.

"You're a good man, Iero." Dan said. "You take this girl of mine somewhere and let her buy you a drink somewhere."

Nicole stood up fake alarmed. "With what money, dear husband of mine?" She laughed.

*****

The first snow came a week before Thanksgiving. They got another four inches on the 22nd, but the day before the holiday itself was clear and cold. Frank took his family to the airport and saw them off on the first leg of their trip back to LA for a visit with Jamia's parents.

"It's not right." She said for the 20th time since planning for the trip started a month ago. "I don't like thinking of you lounging around the house alone on Thanksgiving. That's supposed to be a family day, Frank."

Frank shifted Miles, who looked gigantic and wide eyed in his first big kid jacket, to his other arm. The twins were at one of the big windows, watching planes take off.

"I'm not exactly gonna be crying into my beer." Frank said. "Dan and Nicole are gonna have me over for dinner. Hell, I'm the one who feels guilty. I've never liked these big holiday get together anyway. I start drinking in front of some football game at three and fall asleep at seven and the next day it feels like the Dallas Cowboys are dancing around and yelling inside my head. I just don't like sending you off with the kids."

"I'll be fine." She said. "Flying first class like a queen. And Miles will sleep on the flight from O'Hare to LA, I hope."

"You hope." He said and they both laughed.

The flight was called and the twins scampered over. ""Mommy! Mommy! Come on! The plane is leaving without us!"

"No, they won't" Jamia said. She was clutching all four boarding cards in one hand. She was wearing her fur coat, some fake stuff that was a rich brown, probably a squirrel. Whatever it was supposed to look like, it made her look absolutely lovely.

Perhaps something of what he felt showed in his eyes because she hugged him impulsively, almost crushing Miles between them. Miles looked surprised but not upset.

"I love you so much." She said.

"Mommyyyy!" Cherry said impatiently. "Come on!

"Oh, all right." She said. "Be good, Frank."

"Tell you what." He said, grinning. "I'll be careful. Say hello to your parents for me, Jamia."

"You are so hilarious." She said and rolled her eyes at him. Jamia was not fooled. She know perfectly well why Frank was skipping this trip.

He watched them enter the boarding ramp and disappear from sight for the next week. He already felt homesick and lonely. He moved over to the window where the girls had been, hands stuffed in his coat pockets, watching the baggage handlers loading the hold. He could have come, but he preferred to send his father in law his grandchildren, his daughter and a rude message.

The Delta 727 pulled away from the ramp, turned and he saw Lily at one of the front windows waving frantically. Frank waved back, smiling and then someone hiked Cherry onto the window. Frank waved and Cherry waved back.

"Fly my people safe." He muttered, then zipped his coat and went out to the parking lot. Here the wind howled and moved with force enough to almost tear his beanie off his head. He fumbled with his keys to unlock the car and then turned as the jet rose beyond the terminal building.

****

He was still feeling blue that evening when he recrosses Route 15 after a couple of beers with Nicole and Dan. They had moved into the kitchen tonight due to the weather.

Dan had started a fire in the fireplace and they had sat around it, the beer cold, the heat warm, and Nicole talking about how the Indians had staved off a British landing 200 years ago. 

It should have been a fine evening, but Frank was aware of the empty house waiting for him. Crossing the lawn and feeling the frost crunching under his shoes, he heard his cell phone go off. He broke into a run, got through the front door, and slid most of the way into his favorite chair. He grabbed his phone.

"Hello?"

"Frank?" Jamia's voice, a little distant but absolutely fine. "We're here. We made it. No problems."

"Great." He said and sat down to talk to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shit is gonna go down next chapter. Well it's not that bad I think. Idk you decide.


	12. So Deep That It Didn't Even Bleed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'm far from lonely and it's all that I got"

The Thanksgiving dinner Dan and Nicole put on was great. When it was over, Frank went home. He went upstairs to the bedroom, relishing the quiet a little, took off his shoes and laid down. It was just after three and the day outside was lit with thin, wintery sunshine. He fell asleep shortly after.

It was his phone that woke him up. He groped around for it, trying to pull himself together, disoriented by the fact that it was almost dark outside. He could hear the wind around the corners of the house and the faint heat of the furnace.

"Hello?" He said. It would be Jamia, calling to wish him a happy Thanksgiving. She would put the kids on and they would talk about whatever came to their mind.

But it wasn't Jamia. It was Nicole.

"Frank? Im afraid you're in trouble."

He swung out of bed, still trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes. "What trouble?"

"Well, there's a dead dog over here on our lawn. I think it might be yours."

"Sweet Pea?" He asked. There was a sudden sinking in his stomach. "Are you sure?"

"I'm not one hundred percent sure but it sure looks like her."

"Oh shit. I'll be right over, Nicole."

He hung up and just started there for a minute longer. Then he put his shoes on and went downstairs.

'Well, maybe it isn't Sweet Pea. Nicole said herself she wasn't sure. God, that dog doesn't even want to go upstairs anymore unless someone carries her. Why would she cross the road?'

But in his heart he felt sure that it was Sweet Pea and if Jamia called this evening as she almost certainly would, what was he going to say?

Crazily, he hear himself saying to Jamia: 'I know that anything, literally anything, can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that. Do you want to be the one to explain to them what happened if she gets run over in the road?'

But he hadn't really believe anything was going to happen to Sweet Pea, had he?

'Never mind. Take this one step at a time.'

But that was hard when he remembered how hysterical Cherry got at the prospect of Sweet Pea someday dying.

'Stupid fucking dog. Why did we ever have to get a fucking dog, anyway?'

"Sweet Pea?" He called, but there was only the furnace muttering. The couch in the living room, where she had recently spent most of the time, was empty. She was not lying on any of the radiators. He shook the food dish, the one thing absolutely guaranteed to bring her running if she was in earshot, but no dog came running this time.

He put on his coat and hat and started for the door. Then he came back. He opened the cupboard under the sink and squatted down. There were two kinds of plastic bags there, white Walmart bags for the household trash cans and big black garbage can liners. Frank grabbed a Walmart bag and put it into one of his pockets. Then he let himself out the front door and crossed the street to Nicole's house.

It was about five thirty. The day was ending. The landscape had a dead look. The remainder of sunset was a strange orange line on the horizon across the river. The wind blew straight down the road, numbing his cheeks. He shuddered, but not from the cold. It was a feeling of aloneness that made him shudder. It was strong and persuasive. There seemed no way to say it with a metaphor. It was faceless.

He saw Nicole across the road, bundled up in her duffle coat. Standing on her frozen lawn, she looked like a statue. Just another dead thing.

Frank started across and then Nicole waved. Shouted something Frank could not hear over the wind. Frank stepped back, realizing suddenly that the wind had deepened and sharpened. A moment later an air horn beeped and a semi truck roared past close enough to hit him.

This time he checked both ways before crossing. There was only the truck's taillights, disappearing into the night.

"I thought that truck was gonna get you." Nicole said. Even this close, Frank couldn't see her face and the uncomfortable feeling persisted that this could have been anyone.

"Where's Dan?" He asked, still not looking down at the bundle of fur by Nicole's boot.

"He went to the Thanksgiving church service. He'll probably stay for dinner although I don't think he'll eat anything. He's gotten peckish." The wind gusted, shifting her coat hoof back momentarily and Frank saw that it was indeed Nicole. "It's mostly an excuse for a fundraiser. Why not save the lord by giving him all your money?"

Frank knelt down to look at the cat. 'Don't let it be her.' he wished fervently, as he turned it's head gently on its neck 'Let it be someone's else cat, let Nicole be wrong.'

But of course it was Sweet Pea. She was in no way mangled or disfigured. She had not been run over by one of the big tankers or semis that cruised Route 15. Sweet Pea's eyes were half open, as glazed as black marbles. A small flow of blood had come from her mouth, which was also open. Not a lot, just enough to stain her fur on her chest.

"Yours?"

"Mine." He sighed.

He was aware for the first time that he had loved the dog, maybe not as much as the girls but in his own absent way. In the weeks following her surgery, she had changed, had gotten fat and slow, had established a routine that took her between the bunk beds, the couch and her dish but rarely out of the house. Now, in death, she looked to Frank like she used to. The mouth so small and bloody, filled with needle sharp teeth, was frozen in a snarl. The dead eyes seemed furious. It was as if after the short and placid stupidity of her life, she had rediscovered her real nature in dying.

"Yeah, it's Sweet Pea." He said. "I'll be fucked if I know how I'm going to tell them about it."

Suddenly he had an idea. He would bury her up in the Pet Semetary with no marker or any of that. He would say nothing to them on the phone tonight about her. Tomorrow he would mention casually that he hadn't seen Sweet Pea around. The day after he would suggest that perhaps she had wandered off. Cats did that sometimes. The girls would be upset, sure, But there would be none of the finality, no reprise of Jamia's upsetting refusal to deal with death, just a withering away.

Coward, part of his mind said.

'Yeah. But who needs this hassle?'

"They loved that dog pretty well, don't they?" Nicole asked.

"Yes." Frank said absently. He moved Sweet Pea's head again. The dog had begun to stiffen, but the head still moved much more easily than it should have. Broken neck. Given that, he thought he could reconstruct what had happened. Sweet Pea had been crossing the road and a car or a truck had hit her, breaking her neck and throwing her aside onto the Dollanganger's lawn. Or perhaps the dog's neck had been broken when she struck the frozen ground. It didn't matter. Either way the remains remained the same. Sweet Pea was dead.

He glanced up at Nicole, about to tell her his conclusions, but she was looking away toward that fading orange line of light at the horizon. Her hood had fallen back halfway, and her face seemed thoughtful and stern.. harsh, even.

Frank pulled the bag out of his pocket and unfolded it, holding it tightly to keep the wind from blowing it away. The crackling sound of the bag seemed to bring Nicole back to earth.

"Yeah, I guess they love it pretty well." Nicole said. Her use of the present tense felt sightly eerie...the whole setting, with the fading light, the cold, and the wind struck him as eerie and gothic.

He grabbed her tail, spread open the bag and lifted the dog. He pulled a disgusted face at the sound of the dog's body made coming up. The dog seemed almost unbelievably heavy, as if death had settled into it like a physical weight

Nicole held the other side of the bag and Frank dropped the dog in, glad to be rid of that strange, unpleasant weight.

"What are you going to do with it now?" Nicole asked.

"Put him in the garage, I guess." Frank said. "Bury her in the morning."

"In the Pet Semetary?"

Frank shrugged. "Suppose so."

Nicole was quiet for a minute and then she seemed to reach a decision. "Wait here a minute."

Nicole moved away, with no apparent thought that Frank might not want to wait just a minute on this bitter night. 

He raised his face into the wind d after the door had clicked closed, the garbage bag with Sweet Pea's body in it riffling between his arms.

Content.

Yeah, he was. For the first time since they had moved, he felt that he was in his place, that he was home. Standing here by himself in the afterglow of the day, standing on the rim of winter, he felt unhappy and yet oddly exhilarated and strangely whole. Whole in a wat he had not been, or could not remember feeling that he had been, since childhood.

He tilted his head back and saw cold winter stars in a blackening sky.

How long he stood like that he did not know, although it could not have been long in terms of seconds and minutes. Then a light flickered on Nicole's porch. It was Nicole behind a big four cell flashlight. In her other hand she held what Frank at first thought was a large X and then realized that it was a pick and a shovel.

She handed the shovel to Frank, who took it on his free hand.

"Nicole, what the hell are you up to? We cant bury her tonight."

"Yeah, we can. And we're gonna." Nicole's face was lost behind the glaring circle of the flashlight.

"Nicole, it's dark, it's late. And cold."

"Come on." She said. "Let's get it done."

Frank shook his head and tried to begin again, but the words couldn't come. They seemed so meaningless against the low shriek of the wind, the glowing stars in the black.

"It can wait til tomorrow when we can see."

"Do they love the dog?"

"Yes, but-"

Nicole's voice, soft and somehow logical: "And do you love them?"

"Of course I love them, they're my kids."

"Then come on."


	13. Cigarettes And Stale Perfume

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "hiding with the boys in your bedroom"

On the walk up to the Pet Semetary that night Frank tried to talk to Nicole, but Nicole didn't answer. Frank gave up. That feeling of contentment, odd under the circumstances but a pure fact, persisted. It seemed to come from everywhere. The steady ache in his muscles from carrying Sweet Pea in one hand and the shovel in the other was a part of it. The wind, deadly cold, was a part of it.

Once they got into the woods, there was no snow to speak of. The bobbing light of Nicole's flashlight was a part of it. He felt the pervasive presence of some secret. Some dark secret.

The shadows fell away and there was a feeling of space. Snow shone on the ground 

"Rest here." Nicole said and Frank set the bag down. He wiped sweat off his forehead with his arm. Rest here? But they were here. He could see the gravestones in the moving, aimless sweep of Nicole's light as she sat down in the thin snow and put her face between her arms.

"Nicole? Are you alright?"

"Fine. Need to catch my breath a bit, that's all."

Frank sat down next to her and deep breathed half a dozen times.

"You know." He said. "I feel better than I have in maybe six years. I know that's a crazy thing to say when you're burying your daughter's dog, but it's the truth."

Nicole breathed deeply twice. "Yeah, I know. It is that way once in a while. You don't pick your times for feeling good, anymore than you do for the other. And the place has something to do with it too, but you don't want to trust that. Heroin makes dope addicts feel good when they're putting it in their arms, but it's poisoning them. Poisoning their bodies and poisoning their way of thinking. This place can be like that, Frank, and don't you ever forget it. I hope to god I'm doing right. I think I am, but I can't be sure."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"This place has power, Frank. Not so much here but the place we're going."

"Nicole-"

"Come on." Nicole said and was on her feet again. The flashlight beam illuminated the deadfall. Nicole was walking towards it. Frank suddenly remembered his sleepwalking episode. What was it that Gerard had said?

'Don't go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to. The barrier was not made to be broken.'

But now, tonight, that dream or warning or whatever it had seemed years rather than months distant. Frank felt fine and ready to cope with anything. It occurred to him that this was very much like a dream.

Then Nicole turned toward him and for one moment Frank imagined that it was Gerard himself, his eyes being forced to look at the exposed skull and the dried up cuts on his face, and his fear returned.

"Nicole," He said. "We can't climb over that. We'll each break a leg and then probably freeze to death trying to get back."

"Just follow me." Nicole said. "Follow me and don't look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure."

Frank began to think that perhaps it was a dream, that he had never awoke from his nap.

Nicole turned left, away from the center of the deadfall. The light's beam centered brightly on the jumbled heaps of

(bones)

fallen trees and old logs. The circle of light grew smaller and even brighter as they approached. Without the slightest pause, without even a brief scan to assure herself that she was in the right place, Nicole climbed up.

Frank shortly followed.

She did not look down or search for footholds. It came to her with a strange but total surety that the deadfall could not harm her unless she allowed it to. It was a very dumbass idea but it worked.

For a moment Frank saw Nicole standing on top of the deadfall and then he began down the far side of thr barrier. Yes, that's what it was. Why try to pretend it wasn't? The barrier.

Frank reached the top himself and paused there momentarily. He didn't look down to see, but only switched the heavy Walmart bag with Sweet Pea's body in it from his right hand to his left, exchanging it for the lighter shovel. 

He walked down, looking straight ahead at the bright circle of Nicole's light. Nicole was standing there, waiting for him. 

"We made it!" He shouted. He put the shovel down and tried to give Nicole a high five. "Nicole, we made it!" 

"Did you think we wouldn't?" Nicole asked.

Frank opened his mouth to say something and then he shut it again. He had never really questioned it all and he was not worried about getting back over again.

"I guess not." He said."

"Come on. We still got three miles to go."

They walked. The path did indeed go on. In places it seemed very wide, although the light revealed very little, it was a feeling of space. t other times the path closed in until underbrush scratched stiff fingers across the shoulders of Frank's coat.

Nicole had stopped at the base of a long slope. Frank ran into him. 

Nicole turned toward him. "We're almost where we're going now." She said calmly. "The next bit is like the deadfall. Just follow me and don't look down. You felt us going down hill?"

"Yes."

"This is the edge of what the natives called God's Mouth. The fur traders who came through called it Dead Man's Land and most of them who came never came back again."

Nicole looked at him then shifted the flashlight away.

"There's a lot of weird things down this way. The air's heavier, more ominous or something."

Frank stopped.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing." Frank said, thinking of that night on the dead end road.

"You might see Aurora Borealis. It makes funny shapes, but it's nothing. It you see some of those shapes and they bother you, just look the other way. You may hear sounds like voices, but those are the cicadas. The sound carries. It's funny like that."

"Aurora Borealis?" Frank said doubtfully. "At this time of day, at this time of month, localized entirely in the cemetary?"

"Yep" Nicole said.

"Nicole, where are we going? What the hell are we doing out here in the middle of nowhere?"

"I'll tell you when we get there." 

He almost walked into Nicole's back again. She just had to stop in the middle of the path. Her head was cocked to one side. Her mouth was pursed and tense.

"Nicole? What-"

"Shhh!"

Frank hushed, looking around uneasily. Then he heard crackling underbrush and breaking branches. Something was moving out there. Something big.

He cocked his his head to one side in an unconscious imitation of Nicole and listened. The sound seemed at first distant, then very close. Frank shifted the Walmart bag from one hand to another. Now the thing out there seemed to be so close that Frank expected to see it's shape at any moment.

Bear was no longer what he was thinking was out there.

Now he didn't know just what he was thinking about.

Then it moved away and disappeared.

Frank open his mouth to say something but a loud chirp came out of the darkness. Nicole turned to him and said "Just a cicada. Come on. Almost there."

Frank had lost all sense of time or direction, but they did not walk long before Nicole stopped again and turned toward him.

"Steps here. They're cut into the rock. Forty two or forty four, I can't remember."

She began to climb again and yet again Frank followed.

The stone steps were wide enough, but the sense of the ground dropping away was unsettling. Here and there his shoes gritted on pebbles and stone fragments.

...twelve.. thirteen...fourteen....

The wind was sharper, quickly numbing his face.

....twenty six....twenty seven......twenty eight...

He wasn't looking where he was going and tripped on a large rock, stumbling across the gravel.

"You all tight, Frank?" Nicole murmured.

"I'm okay" he said, although his knee was now scrapped and his muscles throbbed from the weight in the bag.

........ forty two.....forty three...forty four...

"Forty five." Nicole said. "Haven't been up here in years. I never thought I'd have a reason to come back. Here, grab on."

She grabbed Frank's arm and helped him up the last step.

"We're here." Nicole said.

Frank tried to look around but it was too dark to see anything.

"Come on." Nicole said and led him twenty five yards toward the trees. The wind blew hard up here, but it felt clean. 

"The natives sanded off the top of the hill here." Nicole said. "No one knows how and the natives have forgot themselves."

"Why did they do it?"

"This was their burying ground." Nicole answered. "I brought you here so you could bury the dog here. The natives didn't discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners."

She pointed to a random area. "Go on and bury your animal. I'm gonna have a smoke. I'd help you, but you got to do it yourself. Each buries his own. That's the way it was done then."

"Nicole, what's this all about? Why did you bring me here?"

"Because you saved Dan's life." Nicole sat down with her back against one of the trees, cupped her hands around her lighter, and lit her cigarette. "You want to rest a bit before you start?"

"No, I'm okay." Frank said. "Will I really be able to dig her a grave? The soil looks thin."

Nicole nodded slowly. "Mhmm." She said. "Soil's thin, all right. But the soil is deep enough to grow grass is generally deep enough to bury in. And people have been burying here for a long time. You won't find it easy, though."

He didn't. After spending what seemed like hours digging up a grave, Frank tossed the shovel aside and asked Nicole if it was okay.

"Seems fine to me." She said. "It's what you think that counts."

Frank lowered the Walmart bag into the hole and slowly shoveled the dirt back in. He was cold now and tired. Too bad it was a long walk back home. 

He scraped the last bit into the hole with the blade of the shovel and then turned to Nicole.

"Your gravestone." She said.

"Look, Nicole, I'm pretty tired and-"

"It's your daughters cat." Nicole said, and her voice, although soft, was forceful. "They want you to do it right."

Frank sighed. "I suppose they would."

It took another ten minutes to pile up the rocks Nicole handed him. When it was don, there was a pile of stones on Sweet Pea's grave and Frank felt satisfied. It looked right, fitting in with all the others. 

"Are we done now?"

"Yep." Nicole said. "You did good, Frank. I knew you would. Let's go home."

"Nicole-" he began again, but Nicole only grabbed the pick and walked off towards the steps. Frank got the shovel, ran to catch up, and then saved his breath for walking.


	14. Lie, Lie, Lie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Take my hand and let's end it all"

The walk home from the woods and into the Dollanganger's backyard was a difficult one. Frank felt as if time had stopped when they enters the cemetary. He checked his watch not knowing he took it off when he passed out on the bed that afternoon. He exhaled weakly knowing he felt even worse after burying a suprisingly heavy dog. 

It seemed in some weird way he had made up the dream of Gerard, rotting and ghastly, but any connection between that sleepwalking and this had escaped him. It has also occurred to him that the whole adventure had been extremely dangerous and somewhat melodramatic. He could've easily died on the deadfall. Both of them could. It was hard to do things like that sober. In his current state, Frank was willing to surrender to his confusion and emotional trauma over the death of a dog the whole family had loved.

And after a time, they were finally home.

They walked toward his driveway, the wind still violently blowing. Silently, Frank handed Nicole her shovel.

"I better go now." Nicole said after a moment of silence. "Danny is probably on his way and he'll wonder where the hell I am. You got the time?"

Frank opened his coat pocket and checked his phone. "It's about 8:30." He said putting the phone back to sleep.

"8:30?" Nicole repeated. "Really?"

"How late did you think it was?"

"Midnight at least. Guess I'll see you tomorrow Frank." Nicole said beginning to walking back to her house.

"Nicole?"

Nicole turned around, confused.

"What did we do today?"

"We buried your dog?"

"Yeah but is that all we did today?"

"Pretty much." Nicole said. "You're a good man, Frank, but you ask too many questions. Sometimes people have to do things that just seem right. Well, to them I mean. And if they do those things and end up not feeling right, they think they made a mistake. You get me?"

"Yeah." 

"What they don't think is that maybe they should question those feelings of doubt before they questions themselves. What do you think, Frank?"

"I think" Frank said starting to get annoyed. "I think that you should go home."

Nicole ignored him still spouting off. "And no one really cares what's in your heart nowadays, do they?"

"Nicole-"

"They don't." Nicole said, answering her own question. "It's a secretive thing. The soil of a man's heart is stonier."

Frank recognized the phrase and suddenly perked up. "Nicole, I-"

"Don't question me, Frank. Accept what is reality and believe your mind."

"But-"

"But nothing. We did what was right...at least I hope it was right."

"Well would you at least answer one fucking question?" Frank snapped.

"Jesus Christ, what is it?"

"How do you know about that place?" This question has occurred to Frank on the way back.

"From an old friend." Nicole said, looking surprised.

"They just told you?"

"No. It isnt the kind of place you just tell someone about. I buried my dog up there when I wss ten. He was chasing a rabbit and got caught on some rusty barbed wire. His wounds got infected and it killed him."

There was something wrong about that, something that just didn't fit but Frank was too tired to do anything about it. Nicole finally shutted up as well.

"Goodnight." She said crossing the road, carrying the shovel. 

"Thanks!" Frank shouted impulsively.

Nicole didnt turn around. Just raised a hand to indicate that she heard.

And in Frank's coat, his phone rang.

******

Frank picked up his phone, walking back inside his house. He heard nothing but the beep of someone hanging up. It just seemed too much work to dial the number back, to hear his father in law or worse his mother in law. To be passed on to Jamia and then to miles then to the girls. Lily would still be up because of her night owl tendencies. She would ask him how Sweet Pea was doing.

'Oh he's doing great. Got hit by a semi truck. Somehow I'm positive it was a semi truck. Anything else would be less dramatic, if you know what I mean. You don't? Well, nevermind. The truck killed her but it didn't scramble her up. Nicole and I buried her in the Pet Semetary. Amazing walk, honey. I'll take you all up there and we'll put flowers by her grave.'

He plugged up his phone near the nightstand outlet and got into bed without changing into pajamas.

The watch was there where he had left it and he looked at it. 9:10. It really was incredible.

He turned off the light and slept.

****  
He woke up around 3 am still thinking about what Nicole told him about her dog. He died of infection after being caught in barbed wire. But when they all walked up to the Pet Semetary, Nicole said that her dog had died of old age and was buried there. Frank shook the thought out of his head and blamed it on memory loss due to time. 

And although a lot of other things happened that year, Frank was never bothered by the corpse of Gerard Way again.


	15. Better Find Another Superstition

Travis Barker called around 9:30 and asked if Frank would like to come up to play some tennis. Frank declined telling Travis hr wanted to work on an article he was writing.

"You sure?" Travis asked.

"Call me later." Frank said. "Maybe I'll be up for it."

Travis said he would and hung up. Frank had told only a half lie, he had plan to work on his article about chicken pox and how it destroys the immune system, but the min reason he turned Travis down was that Frank was a bundle of aches and pains.

His back muscles groaned and cracked, his shoulders were sore from carrying Sweet Pea in that damned Walmart bag and his knees felt like guitar strings three octaves past the normal pitch. He would have looked funny trying to play tennis with Travis, falling down like an old man.

He spent a hour and a half working on his article, but it still looked like utter shit. The emptiness and the silence began to get on his nerves and so he closed the word document he was writing, put on his jacket and crossed the road.

Nicole and Dan weren't there, but there was an envelope taped to the door with his name written across it. He took it down and opened it up.

'Frank,  
Danny and I are off to NYC to do some shopping and to look at a couch that Dan had his eye on for about a hundred years. We'll probably be back by this afternoon so come on over for a beer or two tonight if you want. Your family is your family. I don't want to be a devil's advocate but if i had kids, I wouldn't rush to tell them that their dog got ran over. Why not let them enjoy their vacation?

By the way, I wouldn't talk about what we did last night, not around Belleville. There are other people who know about that old burying ground and there are other people in town who have buried their animals there. People around here don't like to talk about it and they don't like people they consider to be outsiders to know about it, not because some of these old superstitions go back three hundred years or more, but because they sorta believe in those superstitions and they think any outsiders who knows that they do must be laughing at them. Does that make any sense? I suppose it doesn't, but nevertheless thats how it is. So just do me a favor and keep shut on the subject. We will talk more about this, probably tonight and by then you will understand more, but in the meantime I want to tell you that you did good. I knew you would.   
Nicole's

Frank stood on the top step leading to the Dollanganger's porch frowning over this note. Other animals buried there? Superstitions going back three hundred years?

He touched that line lightly with his finger and for the first time allowed his mind to deliberately turn back to what they had done the night before. It was blurred in his memory, it had the weird hazy effect memories eventually get. 

Slowly he refolded the note and put it back into the envelope. He put the envelope into his pocket and crossed the road again.

***

It was around one that afternoon when Sweet Pea came back. Frank was in the garage trying to fix a shelf. He was hammering in a nail when Sweet Pea strolled in. Frank didn't drop the hammer or even slam his thumb. His stomach slightly dropped as if he spent the entire day waiting for her to come back. 

He put the hammer down carefully, spat the nails he had been holding in his mouth back into his palm and then dumped them in a container. He went to Sweet Pea and picked the dog up.

His stomach dropped even lower and for a moment the garage seemed to fade out in front of his eyes.

Sweet Pea laid her ears back and allowed herself to be held. Frank carried her out into the sunlight and sat down on the back steps. 

He examined gently into the thick fur at Sweet Pea's neck remembering the sick, boneless way Sweet Pea's head had swiveled on her broken neck the night before. He felt nothing now but good muscle support. He held the dog up and looked at her mouth closely. What he saw there caused him to drop the dog onto the grass quickly and to wince in shock. The whole world was fading now and his head was on a sick vertigo.

There was dried blood caked on Sweet Pea's mouth and caught in his fur were two tiny shreds of plastic. Bits of a bag.

Oh god, Frank understood more than he wanted to right now.

****

He let Sweet Pea into the house, got her dish and poured in some food. Sweet Pea rubbed her head against Frank's arm making him uncomfortable. It just felt too wrong, too unusual.

When he bent and put the dish on the floor, Sweet Pea ran past him to get it and Frank could have sworn he smelled dry earth almost as if the dog had bathe in it.

Abruptly, Frank turned and went upstairs locking his bedroom door behind him. He slumped down into the bed and tried to comprehend the whole situation.

'The Dog came back, just like Frankenstein, all right, what's the big deal?'

It had all been a mistake. Hadn't he thought to himself yesterday that Sweet Pea looked whole and unmarked for an animal that had been hit by a car.

'Think of all the cats and dogs and raccoons you've seen strewn all over the highways. Their bodies burst, their guts everywhere. All in high definition technicolor.'

It was obvious now. Sweet Pea had been struck hard and knocked out. The dog he carried up to the burying ground had been unconscious, not dead! Thank god he didn't have to say anything about it now. The kids wouldn't ever have to know how close Sweet Pea had come.

'Oh god the blood on her mouth the way her neck turned the coarse fur'

But he was a doctor, not a vet. He had made a misdiagnosis. That's it. It was cloudy and and almost freezing cold. And he wasn't even wearing gloves. That could have-

A bloated misshapen shadow rose on the bedroom wall. Frank jerked upward making the blankets go everywhere in the room. He turned staring into the muddy brown eyes of the dog who was perched on the nightstand.

Sweet Pea was swaying back and forth as if drunk. Frank watched, his body crawling with revulsion, a scream trying to be choked out. Sweet Pea had never looked liked this. For the first and last time he thought of the idea that this was a different dog, one that just looked Sweet Pea, a dog that had just wandered into his garage while he was putting up those shelves and that the real Sweet Pea was still buried under that grave in the woods.

But the markings were the same....and that one crooked ear....and the paws that had that sharp look to them.

It was Sweet Pea, all right.

"Get out." Frank whispered hoarsely at her. 

Sweet Pea stared at him a moment longer and then leaped down from the nightstand. She staggered awkwardly and then she was gone.

Frank got out of bed and remade it. He was almost done when his phone rang, echoing in the empty house. His heart was racing. His mind felt fucking of adrenaline. 

It was Travis, checking back about tennis and Frank agreed to meet him at his house in an hour. He didn't have time and tennis was the last thing in the world he felt like doing right now, but he had to get out. He had to get away from that dog, that weird dog which had no business being there at all.

He hurried, taking two steps at a time down the stairs. Sweet Pea was lying at the bottom. Frank tripped and almost fell. He managed to grab the banister and barely save himself from what could have been a terrible fall.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs, breathing uncontrollably, his heart racing, the adrenaline moving through his body.

Sweet Pea stood up, stretched and seemed to grin at him.

Frank left. He should have put the dog out. He knew that but he didn't. At that particular moment he didn't think he could bring himself to even touch it.


End file.
